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Sandra Celt Essays and scholarship

Mythfits, Gynetic, Di, etc., are not typos; they are intentional.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part 1

Table of Contents

A Personal Preface

RELIGION, MYTH, AND ECONOMICS

Ruminations on Religion

The Mythfits

Capitalism with a Human Face

The Passion of the Passion

An Idiosyncratic Religion Bibliography

THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Defusing Culture Shock

Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed

Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

Anglos and Insects

The Di is Cast

The American Dream, Perverted

A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

FORECASTS

Gynetic Engineering

Toward an Anthropology of the Future

The Kom Dynasty (China)

Goodbye Future!

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Preface

Horses do not wear blinders for their own benefit, but for the convenience of owners who want to keep them "focused" (a euphemism for "limited")--although at least the contraptions are mechanical and easily removed. The blinders worn by people, however, are much more problematic, as they are generally internalized in early childhood, long before the person has been able to develop any kind of critical thinking; like a neurosis, they have to be dismantled cautiously, step by step, as a chick chips away at its eggshell from the inside. (In savagely repressive societies, any blinder-dismantling must be clandestine so as not to jeopardize physical survival, since overtly disobedient slaves are usually not suffered to live.) Blinders make us sacrifice the fullness of our human potential for someone else's convenience; paraphrasing Theodore Dreiser, we do not live, but are being lived by an organism which needs millions like us in order to express itself. Which means that we might as well be ants.

The purpose of this volume is to help dismantle blinders and build holistic (meaning synthetic and stereoscopic) vision for people who want to stop being prisoners of their culture, be they budding diplomats hoping to avoid ethnocentrism; students groping toward a major in anthropology, comparative literature, or international studies; entrepreneurs wishing to do business in a baffling country; conscientious tourists anxious to get the most from their travels by honing their observation and interpretation skills; retirees eager to expand their horizons; graduate students fishing for a dissertation hypothesis; teachers and journalists curious about the dynamics of culture change; or even social-science experts intrigued about de-specialization's ability to stimulate creative thinking and build bridges between disciplines.

The value of such vision can be demonstrated by analogy with plane and solid geometry: a two-dimensional triangle has 180 degrees, a three-dimensional one 270. A less theoretical advantage can be gleaned from the following negative example: a German electronics giant sold its fax technology to the Japanese a few decades ago because it did not want to compete with its own telex division. Evidently nobody possessed the cross-cultural awareness to realize that Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam are virtually the only Asian countries that use the Latin alphabet and can thus send telexes. Until the advent of fax technology, for instance, Taiwanese businesspeople had to laboriously number-code their ideographic Chinese characters in order to be able to send telexes at all. The fax divestiture was thus a financial disaster.

We need holistic thinking to help us in creative management of the future, and should start by letting go of outdated solutions and counterproductive policies. As I mentioned in "USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed" (International Law Review, 1992), corporate thinking is not necessarily appropriate diplomacy. Americans who believe that we will be as great as we were from 1946 to 1973 if we act the way we did then are confusing cause and effect: actually, we only had the luxury of behaving the way we did because we were great. "Recalibrating Bilingual Education" (in my separate compendium, "Thought for Food: Adventures in Language and Literary Scholarship") and "Au Pair Means Everybody Wins" show why some bilingual education and the au pair system as presently practiced are counterproductive. May holistic thinking also help keep diplomacy and economics from falling into the traps of their own ultimately destructive interplay of myopic self-interest. Examples would be our former knee-jerk anti-Communism (which supported any dictator who made the right noises) and big business' present addiction to cheap labor, which is greatly increasing China's military and economic power and sending the U.S. into financial ruin and a re-feudalized economy. Doing business with China entails entering into a joint venture, typically with the People's Liberation Army; the Chinese military is thus making money hand over fist, and they are not using it to buy flowers.

The fullness of human experience can also be limited by the blinders imposed on people by their field of specialization, which makes it easy to overlook interdisciplinary and intercultural connections like the impact of child abuse upon a society's national character. My ambition is to raise people's consciousness about how any society, language, or discipline, like a work of art, is a consistent pattern which emphasizes those elements which are expedient to it and de-emphasizes (or even sacrifices) the inconvenient ones. The essays in this book are meant to provide a general introduction to various aspects of the vast field of international studies along the lines of "something for everyone," and thus contain sections as ostensibly disparate as travel impressions, language and literature, intercultural diplomacy, and social criticism. They are meant to function as ideational hors d'oeuvres; once the intellectual appetite has been whetted in the direction of a particular specialty, it can easily go elsewhere for myriad highly focused monographs of an advanced scholarly nature.

The essays will probably strike the typical reader as idiosyncratic--enjoyed for their "unique perspective" by some and decried as childish or stupid by those who cannot distinguish between maturity (or reason) and convention. My viewpoint is probably attributable to having been raised in almost half a dozen societies and languages before I was six (the "magic age" at which the intuitive hemisphere of the brain begins to lateralize to the logical one), which means I soon realized that there is no single correct way to do or say anything any more than there is a single correct way to cook carrots. (Social scientists say that children are the best linguists and cultural anthropologists in the world.) In other words, I was not socialized thoroughly enough in any of an overlapping plethora of systems to don any particular society's blinders; even if I wanted to be conventional, I would not know which convention to pick. As a perennial nowhere-woman, however, I believe I see the world more clearly than it sees itself because I do not identify with any in-group or knee-jerk sectarianism.

"USA, Inc." and "When Language Is Not Really the Problem" (in Thought for Food) focus on cross-cultural issues encountered in my personal and professional experience and show the enormity of the damage misunderstandings and counterproductive policies can cause. "The Mythfits" and "Anglos and Insects" hints how society can bamboozle conventional people by selling them their own clichés. For instance, an astute public-relations company can easily exonerate the authorities for administrative failures by trotting out magic words such as "freedom" and "choice" to sell the concept of charter schools instead of improving the existing system, as if the absence of decent public education were somehow liberating. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe formulated it perfectly: a slave who thinks he's free is the biggest slave of all.

In addition to the syncretic (synthetic and stereoscopic) view formed by a multilingual environment, my instinct and training as a teacher, translator, and interpreter make me try to bring people together and explain problems so as to prevent or defuse tension. There is also the possibility that this is partially a "female thing," since the corpus callosum is 40% larger in women than in men; if it contains connective tissue between the hemispheres of the brain, as believed by some researchers, that would explain why men can totally focus on one stimulus and completely tune out everything else, while women are better able to integrate the rational and the intuitive. This could be part of our phylogenetic substratum: a hunter who cannot concentrate is unlikely to catch game, and a mother who knows nothing but durability calculations for load-bearing reinforced concrete will probably not see her children survive. My syncretic viewpoint is apparently supported by science.

I further find that some correlations not only fraudulently imply causality, but also have the irrelevant congruence of two measurements of the same phenomenon measuring each other. For instance, if we take a classroom where the students are allowed to sit wherever they like, and thereupon find that those sitting in the front rows get better grades, I contend that the seating sequence does not cause the grades, nor vice versa; rather, both measure something entirely different, namely the students' motivation, and are thus skewed in the same direction.

Furthermore, science is not proof, but disproof: it is unscientific to say that something is not possible without testing it, and you need to have a hypothesis (or at least a hunch) before you can test anything. Borrowing an image from theoretical physics, we can visualize the imagination as ice-crystals ramifying in search of support like morning-glory tendrils, spinning multiple possibilities into tiny nowheres, waiting to be channelled into the realm of a single concrete reality.

Societal blinders typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities or latent connections (and sometimes be lulled into glossing over significant differences because of similarities in style or vocabulary). "Defusing Culture Shock" and "The Mythfits" include several examples of the unnecessary culture shock thus engendered: why suffering in noble silence can cause you to lose a case in a U.S. court; whether movie stars are entitled to refuse to give autographs; why making eye contact with self-important officials can be misinterpreted as disrespect in Italy; and why smiling in anticipation can deprive you of refreshments in New Guinea. Other aspects of social criticism and culture change include thoughts on the effects of technology (the electoral-college system in "When Bush Comes to Shove" and sex selection in "Gynetic Engineering"), de-specialized thinking in "A Holistic Approach to Counter-Terrorism," and returning a warped system to the basics ("Au Pair Means Everybody Wins").

"The Di is Cast" uncovers the phenomenon of unexpected correspondences: I believe unsupportive personnel practices on the U.S. labor market may have helped Americans identify with Princess Di. "Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom" presents some examples of how dissimilar processes can have similar outcomes in different societies--in this case, functioning as conflict preventers. In addition, I can see how immigration to Israel caused by economic problems in the former Soviet Union is exacerbating the Arab-Israeli conflict, and further believe there may be a link between third-world hunger and AIDS. Poverty has driven Africans to hunt and eat primates, causing transmission of a slow virus to which said primates are immune. Cannibals often suffer from similar lentiviruses, such as the "kuru sickness" of New Guinea, especially if they eat components of the nervous system and the brain. (Significantly, the British bovines affected by "mad cow disease" had been fed the ground-up spinal columns of other cows. The whole syndrome may simply be nature's way of weeding out cannibalism. I am surprised that European government ministers knew so much less than an agro-klutz like me.) However, when I thought this hypothesis out loud, not even my own husband believed me--until evidence surfaced twelve years later in a documentary film excerpt showing Africans eating apparently raw chimpanzee flesh. Cf. also Edward Hooper's The River, which attributes AIDS to a polio vaccine that used cells from non-human primates in order to attenuate the live virus.

Similarly, Americans who disdain the corruption in foreign countries fail to realize that the term deserves to be extended to privileged insiders "working the system" in Washington and to shareholders making exploitative profits from third-world labor. Cross-culturally speaking, corruption seems to be tolerated as long as everyone gets a cut. American stockholders did not rebel against exorbitant revenues until CEO's started skimming off too many millions in bonuses for themselves, just as the Iranians did not revolt against the Shah until he purchased military toys instead of sharing the windfall oil monies of the mid-'seventies. Similarly, American university professors denounce fraternity hazing, but fail to realize that it differs only in style from their own behavior, from the sadism of Ph.D. oral exams to various types of academic abuse. (Cannibalism exists in only two places in the world: New Guinea and academe.) Also, the Chinese appear to believe that no one will object to their brutal conquests as long as they are termed "liberation."

In other words, cultural differences and culture change are often a matter of style rather than substance, divergent viewpoints which can converge like parallax in stereoscopic vision.

As elucidated in greater detail in my separate compendium "Thought for Food: Adventures in Language and Literary Scholarship"), for the better part of the 20th century semanticists from Korzybski to Chase to Weinberg have pointed out that the distinctions made by language are often specious--corruption and gain, body and soul, time and space. In fact, I think my most incisive input is in the field of language because of my early childhood cosmopolitanism and later linguistic training and experience. The idiosyncratic introduction is followed by essays on subjects such as bilingual education, cross-cultural problems, translation theory, poetics, song lyrics, and literary criticism.

This leads me to my forecasts. By no means do I have visions; if I am even a prophet (of sorts) at all, it is merely because I can foresee the logical consequences of what is happening now, such as that it is only a matter of time before a runaway subway crashes into the train in front of it. Being in the first wave of the postwar baby boom has also trained me to anticipate my needs, as everyone else will soon be wanting whatever I do. As an example: I wrote "Gynetic Engineering" in the early 'seventies because I knew that amniocentesis and selective abortion would be likely to counter-select daughters, especially in male-supremacist societies, thus interfering with the near-1:1 sex ratio which is largely a product of the randomness of nature. Not even Ms. Magazine was interested in publishing my article. A quarter-century later my prediction came true, except that the instrument of choice has become ultrasound rather than amniocentesis. I predict that China (and probably the Indian subcontinent as well) will become more belligerent in the future because a similar surplus of disgruntled unmarried men is precisely what made the Vikings so dangerous a thousand years ago: the explosive social combination of primogeniture and polygyny produced a plethora of ruthless marauders who could otherwise never have land, jobs, prospects, or women.

In studying the science of anthropology--which, like linguistics, provided the theoretical substratum for what I had instinctively known all along--I was particularly struck by two factors: the difference between the hunter-gather and peasant mentalities, and the extent to which a society's economic system and "modal personality" (similar to the "national character") largely correlate with its child-rearing practices--although any causality must certainly have become circular by now. "Toward an Anthropology of the Future" dissects the differences in mentality (such as between the U.S. and China), shows how these differences affect aspects as surprising as employment practices, academic abuse, and grief, and forecasts some possible repercussions.

In international business, China can be expected to act less like a friend than a predatory partner who sucks the company dry of know-how and clients. I am basing my expectation on China's historically having figured as a mercantilistic super-corporation whose CEO's are subject to no regulation or accountability, except for periodic slave rebellions when abuses become intolerable. Ask any Tibetan, Vietnamese, or Korean how Chinese officials have been treating conquered peoples for thousands of years--and they are scarcely less beastly to their own, whom they treat as subjects rather than citizens. (I believe the Chinese supreme ambition of "serving the state" is code for "bullying people.") China can be expected to become increasingly dangerous as it grows in strength thanks to cheap exports (textiles, footwear), so we will wind up kicking ourselves in the behind with our own shoes, especially since the former Soviet Union no longer represents any kind of military counterweight. I hope I am wrong, but I believe it is only a matter of time--and time means nothing to these people--before the Chinese become a ghastly economic, ecological, and military threat, especially if we are significantly weakened by Al Qaeda. See "The Kom Dynasty" for further details, especially the historical continuity of Chinese politics and the Mandate of Heaven theory.

Finally, "Goodbye Future" is a glum forecast on the manner in which I expect corporate greed, individual irresponsibility, and external military and financial threat to intersect within a generation or two, drawing a parallel to what happened in Poland several centuries ago because the nobility sold their own commoners down the river for their own selfish gain. People do not seem to realize that Communism is actually state capitalism and that the logical extreme of private capitalism is a feudal economy. Globalization merely increases the multinationals' hunting-grounds: the recent destructive hedge-fund attacks on the Thai baht can be likened to a modern international fox-hunt, where an entire year's crop falls victim to some aristocratic sport. Computers may actually have accelerated the latter process in the sense that corporate city-states have now been joined by those in cyber-space. At any rate, I can hear Adam Smith and Henry Ford chastising us from the grave: "Have you not learnt/ haven't you learned anything from what we taught about enlightened self-interest and broad-based prosperity?" I wrote "Capitalism with a Human Face" to explain the rudiments of capitalism to my Eastern European friends, whose economic logic was warped by totalitarian illogic. Communism is in fact a religion (much more so than Buddhism, which is essentially atheistic): God is the Revolution, the Church is the Party, and the apparatchiks are the priests. No wonder Communists are prone to financial failure: what can a priest possibly learn about economics by sitting around in church all day? Please see "Ruminations on Religion" for a personal but considered view of the interplay between religion and economics.

Of course, I hope I am wrong about the sinister forecasts, but dismissing them will not make me so. Let us hope that this collection of essays can help us dismantle or at least partially perforate our blinders, so we can stop viewing factors in isolation, distinguish the basic similarities under the glare of superficial differences, and recognize that much of what we take for granted is artificial or serendipitous and thus unsustainable in the long run. This will help us plan better for a radically different future and make the systemic changes without which we cannot survive, let alone flourish.

RELIGION, MYTH, AND ECONOMICS

Germi-Nations

Human beings have a phylogenetic need for community, as our ancestors could hardly have survived unless they stuck together after coming down from the trees; this probably explains the instinctive attraction of communalist philosophies based on this phylogenetic need subsequently hijacked by dictators routinely and with ease. Hunter-gatherers lived in bands of 25-50 people, practicing infanticide if necessary to prevent overpopulation, whereas agriculturalists could form tribes of 500 or more because of increased food production.

Just as most of the sciences grew out of an initially amorphous philosophical movement, I believe religion, myth, and economics began to germinate with the advent of agriculture and trade, much like stem cells develop into various organs. Hunter-gatherer economics and religion are usually small-scale affairs characterized by loose trade networks, animistic thanksgiving, and shamanic initiation rituals. Agriculture can feed greater numbers of people but is more problematic if famine is to be avoided; it requires much more elaborate management and planning (sowing, harvesting, storage, trade). I suspect that organized religion grew from the need to predict and influence the future, much as advertising was born from the need to entice people to buy existing mass-produced goods and services; purchases had theretofore involved the ordering and manufacture to the customer's specifications of items that existed only as an idea.

Ruminations on Religion

Just as I believe language is a prehistoric work of art, I hold religion to be prehistoric science because it attempts to construct a system to make sense of the world in general. I am too much of an international comparatist to think of religion as being anything but entirely man-made, which is probably why I am partial to Buddhism: it admits to being man-made, a teaching philosophy with no supreme being. This essay details my personal but considered opinions on the topic; students of comparative religion are as likely to find it simplistic as laics are to find it outrageous, although I of course think it eminently logical.

According to French anthropologist Emile Durkheim, in any society God is society and embodies the values said society needs to survive. The Latin etymology, religio, shows that the function of religion is to bind people together. It is thus not surprising to find a widespread congruence between a society's religion and its economy; we need only remember the ministers of the antebellum South preaching that Africans were innately inferior because they were descended from Noah's disrespectful son Ham. Probably the most perfect congruence to date has been Communism: God is the Revolution, the Party is the Church, and the apparatchiks are the priests--who can hardly know anything about economics because they spend all their time in church. Since the system conferred almost total economic control to virtual theologians, it was only a matter of time before it failed--imagine what would have happened if medieval clerics had had the power to determine the price of bread. Christianity and Communism were both synthesized by penniless Jewish philosophers faced with a society in flux; both started out as love and poetry and wound up as bookkeeping and control. Another problem of Communism is that it promised a pie on earth, which is eminently disprovable (and has been disproved), whereas Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism promise a pie in the sky or the next time around, which is eminently non-disprovable.

Anthropologists say that the function of myth (a primary element in nearly every religion) is to justify the supremacy of society; I take this to mean that it betrays the individual almost by definition because it legitimizes the status quo at his or her expense. In my opinion, the main function of religion is in fact social control, and this would include systems which do not avail themselves of the supernatural, such as Communism and the folk religions of China.

An instance of religion making economic sense would be India's reverence for sacred cows, which wander about like scavengers (the Indians call them "brake inspectors") because in order to provide profitable amounts of milk or meat, they would need a lot of grazing space or fodder, something which an overpopulated country can ill afford. For the same reason, Indian cows produce very few calves, half of which are gelded for use as oxen. However, no matter how skinny, barren, and milkless a cow may be, she still produces dung, which is the principal fuel of the Indian countryside! (My Indian friends misunderstood this as an indication of their society's superiority rather than a general vindication of tradition.)

In my considered opinion, India's belief in karma, caste, and reincarnation is also economic in origin. According to anthropologists, the societies most likely to believe in reincarnation are those in which a person's social group is very small (such as tiny hunter-gatherer bands or the restricted circles of caste systems). Following this logic, you cannot accept the death of someone so close to you and therefore have to endow him or her with another life. However, this argument fails to convince me, since it implies that the person so close to you now is just a reincarnation of someone else. In the case of India, I believe reincarnation and the caste system combined to justify the socio-economic inequality inevitably following the Aryan conquest, the resulting primitive concept of "karma" (you deserve what you are now because of what you did in a previous lifetime) being the earliest instance of social Darwinism I know of. I believe that original sin is the Catholic Church's misinterpretation of karma, brilliant and probably intentional because it gives man a built-in defect which only the Church can cure, while karma is something you make all by yourself, and it can be good. For instance, in India a Hindu engineer who took care of the fountains at one of the gardens engaged me in conversation and explained to me that I must have done a lot of good for people in my past life because I was now free to travel about. What a nice explanation!

The problem with the caste myth is that the top dogs become abusive when they view this as privilege without responsibility, whereas the underdogs vegetate in unproductive passivity, figuring that they deserve their lot and can do nothing about it except blindly endure. However, consumerism, universal suffrage, and prosperity have recently started making India's lower classes impatient and resentful of their inferior status, so I would not be surprised to see a caste-based bloodbath erupt in the future (of course I hope I am wrong). Sexual inequality is a further problem: daughters are viewed as liabilities, not assets, largely because the grooms' families insist on huge dowries despite the fact that the dowry system was officially outlawed in the sixties. According to a Sixty Minutes segment, some two brides are burned to death every day in Delhi alone when their families cannot come up with additional dowry payments demanded retroactively by their in-laws. The selective abortion of female fetuses subsequent to USG or amniocentesis also worries me almost as much as for India as it does for China, since societies with an overpopulation of unmarried have-not males tend to be warlike, or at least nasty (cf. the Vikings a thousand years ago). I expect a dearth of females to accentuate the existing military imperialism of China and inward antagonism of India within a few decades.

So what happened to prehistoric science's original attempt to make sense of the world? The great religions all seem to have started out idealistically, as poetry and love, then degenerated into bookkeeping and control (and often intolerance or even violence) when they extended to the society at large and became institutions. Why? I have the suspicion that cynical conventionalists want to know what the absolute minimum is that they must perform in order to get credit, and thus nitpick "Exactly what do you mean by (whatever)?"--which explains why we now have all these rules. I need no scary myth or detailed instructions to deter me from being a bad person; I simply try to be a good one.

This view also helps me comprehend the principles behind and similarities among the various religions and use India's love of speculation (as distinct from China's love of classification) to formulate a few hypotheses which conventional people will probably reject. I reached the conclusion that Jesus must have studied Buddhism and/or Hinduism; after all, Emperor Ashoka sent missionaries as far west as Syria, and Alexander the Great brought back a host of new religious ideas. (However, Jesus apparently did not have enough time to do a thorough job; being a teacher myself, I can see his disciples clutching at half-remembered phrases they did not quite understand.) For instance, the arhats flanking a Buddha statue in Kyongju, South Korea, are pronouncing the syllables "ah" and "om," i.e. the first letter of the alphabet and the sound of the universe; this appears to be the origin of the New Testament's "alpha and omega" and makes a lot more sense than having a Jewish carpenter speaking Greek to a bunch of Jewish fishermen. Both Christianity and Buddhism were casteless, which appealed to the lower classes and probably explains why the orthodox rabbis and brahmins felt their power to be threatened. Catholicism's "resurrection of the body" sounds suspiciously like a misunderstanding of the principle of reincarnation. The ancient Judaism which formed the original basis of Christianity had no concept of an afterlife. Nor of a Trinity, which must surely have come from Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer, each in conjunction with his female consort. Interestingly enough, Shiva is also the god of love, which I eventually decided is not a paradox because love includes change, both evolutionary and revolutionary. So I would call Shiva the god of change and Vishnu the god of no-change, who operate in timeless oscillation because the Creator has since become otiose (a deity who creates the world and then retires). I wish geologists would learn from this example: catastrophism and uniformitarianism do not necessarily exclude each other.

I view Buddhism as a reformation of Hinduism because it provides a method for faster and more systematic improvement of your karma for future lives, to the point where you can eventually reach "Nirvana," a blissful state of eternal enlightened nonexistence ("Buddha" means "enlightened one") which releases you from the tiresome treadmill of suffering and rebirth. The symbol of this process of perfectibilization is the lotus, a flower which grows in filthy water, overcoming its slimy origins to rise into something beautiful and pure. The Hinayana or Theravada ("lesser vehicle") school of Buddhism is only interested in personal salvation in the sense of achieving Nirvana, whereas the Mahayana ("greater vehicle") has produced bodhisattvas, saintly figures who are entitled to Nirvana but instead choose to remain behind to help their fellow sentient beings. I call Jesus the Bodhisattva of the West; in the Gospels, he stated explicitly that he was a Son of Man, not of God, but, like the Buddha, he was deified in spite of himself, especially after Constantine imposed Christianity upon the Roman Empire and made it hierarchical so as to render it more palatable to worshippers of Olympian gods. According to "Frontline: From Jesus to Christ," originally aired by PBS on April 4 and 8, 1998, the last thing Jesus meant to do was to start a new religion. He merely wanted people to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law (if your ox falls into a well on the Sabbath, don't tell me you're not going to try to save him). His exhortation to not go by the book all the time was of course perceived as a threat to the power of the priests, who had after all written the book. Jesus wanted to get people to think for themselves; how ironic that the religion based on his teachings has become one of the most unthinkingly dogmatic in the world. As an example: priests could marry until about a thousand years ago (they still can in the Coptic, Uniate, and Eastern Orthodox rites), but the Catholic Church put a stop to marriage (but not to sexual activity) because too many of them were bequeathing Church property to their children. Why should all these poor guys suffer now because Rome applied a wrongheaded remedy to their larcenous colleagues a millennium ago? Besides, the celibacy rule discourages normal men from becoming priests.

Many Buddhist tenets became reabsorbed into Hinduism around the eighth century (as an example, the Buddha was reclassified as Vishnu's ninth incarnation), whereupon the Muslim invasion delivered the coup de grâce: what was left of Buddhism tended to concentrate in defenseless monasteries, so it was easier to eradicate than the amorphous, disorganized domesticity of Hindu practices, which would have required killing virtually all the people. Example: a Muslim marauder destroyed Nalanda University a few hundred miles east of Varanasi and killed the thousands of students and Buddhist monks. Buddhism would probably have become extinct had it not been for all those texts translated by conscientious committees and safely stored in Tibet.

Having been the object of so much translation activity, the texts of the great religions are also vulnerable to mistranslation. In particular, translators who work into a foreign language rather than their own (such as the non-native Greek of the New Testament compilers) are perfect paradigms for the mistakes engendered by the non-native mind-set, my favorite example being the virginity of Mary. In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, to which the New of course made reference for purposes of legitimacy, Isaiah 7:14 prophesied that an unmarried girl would conceive, using the word "almah"; if he had wanted her to be a virgin (a human female with an intact hymen), he would have said "bethulah." Two thousand years of human behavior have thus been conditioned by a mistranslation! (Admittedly, however, the problem was intermittent in English: five hundred years ago "virgin" meant "young girl," and what we now refer to as a virgin was called a "maid.") Other examples: (1) "in the beginning was the Word" which "became flesh" ("logos" means not only "word," but also "principle," as in bio-logy, psycho-logy, so it should have read "The principle came first, and thereupon became embodied"), and (2) St. Jerome's hilarious misunderstanding of the Old Testament's unpointed Hebrew turned "rays" into "horns" (he should have said that Moses' face was shining--rays were emanating from his face--instead of causing the prophet to grow "horns"). Parenthetically, the Christian fundamentalists' controversy between intelligent design and evolution also turns out to be a non-issue based on a mistranslation: Genesis was not composed in English, but in the Ugaritic dialect of Hebrew, wherein the creation verb (barah) does not exclude evolution.

A holistic and relatively non-reverential approach also enabled me to get past the exotic, outdated begats and verilies of the King James translation and find my own prosaic but satisfying explanation of the Jesus story. In For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (the Hannum couple's translation from the German won the American Translators Association prize around 1986), Swiss psychologist Alice Miller points out that Jesus' earthly parents have not been given enough credit. Because of the prophecy, they raised him in an atmosphere of respect--the New Testament says they served him--at a time when parents tended to be abusive (spare the rod etc.), which means that he grew up to be rational and to foresee logical consequences instead of flailing captively in counterproductive emotions. (The Romans are cruel, if you rebel they will cream you. Nobody listened.) The establishment interpreted his logical teachings as a threat--imagine some hick preacher nowadays travelling to the big city of your choice and disputing the authority of the metro-area cardinal. The local archdiocese would probably find some way to neutralize his influence, such as having him prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. After what I call Jesus' "temple tantrum" with the moneychangers, High Priest Caiaphas evidently decided to make a public example of the case: mess with my economic interests and I'll sic the Romans on you so fast your head will spin. Unsuccessful in the two Jewish trials he had instigated against Jesus, he finally sent his trumped-up case and his thugs to the Romans because Rome had the death penalty. Pontius Pilate reminds me of a judge or arbitrator attempting to resolve a dispute between exotic foreigners whose customs are so baffling and animosities so persistent that he finally throws up his hands in desperation (deal with it yourselves, just leave me out of it) because he knows the defendant to be innocent but fears a riot if he lets him go. I suspect Jesus may actually not have died, since he was only on the cross for three hours and the nails pierced his palms, not his wrists, which was not how trained torturers operated; Pilate may have allowed a sham execution to satisfy the High Priest.

The Pilate story shows how religion is sometimes superimposed upon a situation which is entirely unrelated, such as Northern Ireland (where the actual bone of contention is the legitimacy of the former British occupation) or the Balkans (where the conflict is a residue of the differences between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires and the punitive dismemberment which followed World War I). The Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are largely secular--how radical could they possibly be if their ancestors had only converted to Islam so as to elude taxation and prevent the Turks from kidnapping their little boys to become Janissaries in the infamous devsirme system? I knew early on that the poor Muslims in the former Yugoslavia were paying for what the Turks had done half a millennium earlier, but nobody believed me until a PBS piece on Srebrenica (which aired January 17, 2000) documented General Radko Mladic saying exactly that.

Thankfully, unlike 1914, the Russians are no longer so dogmatic that their knee-jerk sectarian solidarity with the Orthodox Serbs can cause a major war; the most they can do is prevent NATO from spanking their little brother. From what I have seen of Eastern Europe, ethnic hatreds there are often almost tribal because the political borders do not coincide with the linguistic ones. Once they do, the artificial instability is eliminated--and the people revert to what they were all along, namely intolerant peasants with fascistic tendencies.

That said, I contend as follows: Mohamed wanted to unify a bunch of scrappy, superstitious tribesmen and give them laws, but the scrappy, superstitious tribesmen snarled "Who are you to give us laws?" and chased him out of Mecca. He saw how successful the Jews and Christians were with their divine-origin law, so he invented Islam in a hurry, often using simplified summaries of Biblical stories such as Abraham's sacrifice and Sheba's visit to Solomon; the purpose was to legitimize his legislation (advanced at the time, but pre-medieval in our days), which explains why his theology is so rudimentary that centuries of hadith interpretation had to supply it form. If he had in fact been divinely inspired, he would have foreseen and prohibited things that did not yet exist, such as sex-change operations, and would have realized that converting a woman by promising she will be served by 72 (meaning "countless") beautiful houris in the afterlife is ridiculous. This reinforces my suspicion that all religions are entirely man-made.

People will always find or even manufacture pretexts if they want to hurt each other badly enough, which I fear is part of human nature. I find that organized religion seems to be too easily used to bond groups into intolerance of other groups, cynically restricting the number of people who must be treated like human beings, and that many clerics are much more interested in cementing their power base than in helping the individual become a better person. I need no system to try to be a good person or to see the similarities rather than the differences. Much as the Bahai sect of Islam considers all religions to be expressions of the same basic truth, I interpret Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as attempts to explain that God is not a person, but a principle, namely that of perfectibility. I view God as a process of such unfathomable majesty that our paltry attempts at understanding it are like an amoeba's trying to comprehend the theory of evolution; since most people are unable to love a process or principle, they need to anthropomorphize it and give it parental attributes.

I imagine it must be a tremendously mind-easing and anti-hypertensive comfort to think of yourself as the trusting child of a benevolent, omnipotent parent. I also concede that prayer has a powerful placebo effect and keeps unhappy people too busy to undertake actions which could engender negative consequences. However, I cannot imagine that the awesome power which produced the star-soup photographed by the Hubble telescope could possibly be interested in micro-managing our dreary little lives, let alone applauding the destruction of the life it created or equating murder with martyrdom. (A martyr is someone who suffers an injustice inflicted by another, not someone who himself inflicts injustice.) Proof of the existence of God as perfectibility would include the fact that some abused children grow up to be relatively normal; if God did not exist, there would be no such possibility of improvement, victims would transmit the kicks they got in an immutably mechanical manner. I believe the Buddhist lotus (purity overcoming and transcending its origin in filthy water) symbolizes such perfectibilization and have written the following haiku in praise of Chenrezig, the Tibetan version of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion:

Comforting womblike growls

Perfectibilization

True respect for life

The Mythfits

Twice in my lifetime (Reagan and Trump) has the US elected a president who was a fictional character rather than a person: an entertainer who sold his supporters their own collective projection based on movie mythology. A "me and the chimp" actor and a reality-show celebrity who fired fictitious employees can hardly know what they are doing, much less claim brilliant political insight; they have in fact greatly damaged this country, and not only by subjecting it to a three-trillion-dollar bubble of debt which could burst at any moment and lending form and legitimacy to negative impulses. (I contend that anyone who identifies with a bully must be at least a wannabe bully himself.) However, I believe that what I call the "mythfit" phenomenon has been developing for at least several decades as a "Tea Party" backlash against liberals.

In terms of the formation and application of the blinders a society or other group imposes upon its members so as to protect itself from potential threats by unconventional behavior, myth (literally "story" in Greek) plays an absolutely crucial role because it clothes the ideology in a narrative imagery which is easy to understand and remember. The societal myths people accept are shaped by the past and actually betray the individual almost by definition, since their function is to justify the existing system at his or her expense. A perfect example is our purported individuality, which is a convention we paradoxically assert by buying mass-produced products--while the labor market in fact requires workers to suppress the personality almost entirely.

Myth, especially when presented in something as pervasive as television, is an essential factor in promoting the kind of behavior which is good for society. Our log-cabin economic myth was good for society 150 years ago, when rugged individualists were needed to settle the West; it makes us take responsibility for our failures because there are theoretically so many possibilities for success (it is common knowledge that 90% of new businesses fail within the first year). Our society wastefully champions not farsighted big-picture planning, but a plethora of myopic solipsisms among which market factors thereupon select for viability. The truth is that with 330 million lemmings scurrying in as many different directions, some of them are bound to get lucky; the proof is that the resulting variety includes successes every bit as self-absorbed and nonsensical as Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, in her Hunter College lectures and her book Religion and Culture, said that the function of myth is to explain why things are the way they are and cannot be otherwise. (Myth often becomes consolidated into some form of religion, which I find usually starts out as love and poetry and winds up as bookkeeping and control.) Our society once needed courageous loners to settle the West and still obsoletely encourages people to overcome impossible obstacles by denying their existence (or at least their subjective validity), a movie-of-the-week attitude which I consider responsible for the death of a child pilot in the recent past. (Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy even goes so far as to claim that disease does not exist.) We fail to realize that we are not nearly as omnipotent or as much in control of circumstances as our log-cabin myth wants us to believe--it wants us to assume personal responsibility for everything without questioning the impersonal system in any way.

Another example of outdated myth: our glorification of pointless conflict is not necessarily the best way of doing things, let alone the only one. In Brazil and Colombia respectively, virtually no struggle was required to eliminate slavery and institute women's suffrage. Our myth makes our society reward obsession and even ruthlessness, so our leaders are predictably no more normal than actors who doggedly continue auditioning despite hundreds of rejections.

The myths of China and Russia betray the individual to an even greater degree than our own, as they are based on the peasant mentality of conformity and fear of risk. In his film "To Live," for instance, Zhang Yimou shows how the Chinese people blame themselves for tragedies actually caused by governmental stupidity; Russian popular culture glorifies suffering and endurance (which it has raised to the level of an art form) the same way that its American counterpart celebrates the overcoming of obstacles. I visited what was still the Soviet Union in 1991 because my experience with child abuse made me predict that the country would descend into chaos as soon as the people realized they were free. Gorbachev was still in power; I was struck by how people said they finally had the kind of leader they could mourn when he died, as though mournworthiness were a useful administrative attribute.

As for China, I have seen several innocent misinterpretations on the part of blindered Americans unfamiliar with Chinese myth. As an example, some political experts believe Chinese diplomacy is open to change because it is so inconsistent, unfortunately failing to realize that it has an immutably consistent underlying function, namely manufacturing justifications for the military. (Negotiating diplomacy with a Chinese diplomat is equivalent to negotiating a company's mergers-and-acquisitions policy with its public-relations manager.) On a less sinister note, "Mulan" has been touted as a feminist movie, whereas it is in fact a traditional female twist on the mythical obligation of filial piety. Another instance was "The Other Half of the Sky," a documentary of a trip to China made by Shirley MacLaine and friends several decades ago. When asked what they looked for in a husband, the Chinese women uniformly answered "the correct political attitude," while the Americans valued things like "good looks" or "a sense of humor" and marvelled at the vastly different expectations. I contend that the distinction is one of style rather than substance: in both countries, the women wanted husbands with attributes which would make them succeed, or at least survive. The Chinese women were also probably told what to say.

Societal blinders typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities. For instance, in a 'seventies article on Mishima, Esquire magazine used the fact that the Japanese "hai" means both "yes" and "no" as an example of Oriental inscrutability. In fact, "hai" means "the preceding is correct" ("right" or "affirmative" would be a better translation), which eliminates the supposed yes-no mystery entirely. If you ask a Japanese "Don't you drink?" and he answers "Yes," he means "Yes, you are correct, I don't drink."

Underlying similarities are very useful in analyzing--and possibly managing--the dynamics of social changes such as those imminently needed in the United States. As pointed out by Carol Ember of the appropriately named Hunter College, Americans think like hunter-gatherers ("we take risks and forage in the supermarket"). When HG's start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they usually turn on each other in combative inward antagonism, which--unless countered by a transition to the pastoral or peasant mentality--eliminates all but the most brutal members of society, limiting population numbers and fostering the survival of the nastiest. The U.S. equivalent: the bubble of artificial postwar prosperity burst with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, initiating a downward spiral characterized by job desperation, road rage, pre-emptive hostility, and an up-yours attitude not present in more genteel decades (which were admittedly more racist and sexist). Around 1980, there was a crime spree in New York's Times Square area: muggers brazenly robbed passersby, and when they ran out of victims, the bigger muggers attacked the smaller muggers and relieved them of their loot. I expect such behavior to become more generalized as steady financial erosion renders economically spoiled Americans ever more desperate; college-educated natives now have more trouble finding jobs than non-English-speaking immigrants did before 1973. By means of the national debt, we are already raiding our children's trust fund in order to perpetuate the illusion of a postwar prosperity which was artificial to begin with.

Speaking of children: David McClelland, in his Achieving Society, postulates that if children are raised by slaves, they become passive adults lacking in motivation; he uses cross-cultural and historical measurements as intriguing as the per-capita ratio of patent applications. My interpretation: unlike parents, slaves are not interested in imparting useful knowledge to their charges; they just want to keep the young master amused and out of their hair. If McClelland is correct, the fact that our children are increasingly being raised by TV sets and minimum-wage workers (the modern counterpart of slaves) will have a negative impact upon our future competitiveness. Incredibly, folks with children seem less worried about the future than my childless self. I am a relatively sloppy housewife, but if the world were my house, I would never let it run such jeopardy.

According to social scientists, the most violent groups are not those aspiring to power, but those trying to retain or regain it, which probably explains why the political rage of newly unemployed or underemployed white American males has coalesced into hateful violence. Whether by voting or violence, they vent their frustration at being deprived of what they refuse to understand was never a birthright at all, but a historical fluke, and tend to do so in a manner which is at best similar to the thoughtless thumbs watching Roman gladiatorial fights, and at worst militantly reactionary, with bombs being used to mourn the good old days. I expect an increase in violence in the future until the formerly privileged white males die or become convinced of the need for a systemic change in mentality (the latter being unlikely).

In the meantime, reactionary "mythfits" like Theodore Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh, and more recently the violent Trump supporters, advocate what is basically a throwback myth, clinging tenaciously to the past rather than modifying their behavior to accommodate the future. They do not seem to realize that the perfect freedom they so idealize is actually mere license: dangerous to the individual, antithetical to equality, and only possible in isolation. True freedom requires rules so as not to infringe upon the rights of others: my freedom to swing my fist ends where someone else's nose begins. For instance, imagine what would happen to our roadways if there were no traffic regulations: bullies would quickly turn the resulting chaos into fascism. This is hard to explain to Russians because their language has no word exactly corresponding to our "freedom," only volnya (doing whatever you feel like, even at someone else's expense) and svoboda (essentially the absence of restrictions on movement, which makes sense because serfs were legally bound to the land). A typical Russian is likely to think Americans are not free because they have to obey rules.

Elements of comparative literature might also help contribute to a useful interdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing social change. They already proved useful toward the end of World War II, when the U.S. wanted to know how best to treat the about-to-be-vanquished Japanese but could of course not do anthropological field work (an effort ably documented in Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword). Some of the parallels between the Unabomber and Oklahoma City attacks and the murders in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment are extremely startling, especially to someone who has studied anthropology and understands what the characters' names mean in Russian. The root for Raskolnikov is "to separate," as in the Greek "krinein"; the protagonist's name can thus be translated as "the critic." Other characters also have significant names, such as Razumihin (Reasoner) and Marmeladov (the spineless jelly that he is). To a certain extent, the following considerations may also apply to rabid racists and other fanatics.

Raskolnikov considers himself so superior to the mass of mankind that the laws of normal government do not apply to him and he is entitled to decide who deserves to live. McVeigh, Kaczynski, and the violent Trumpists seem to have been moved by a similar sinister messianism which views government and technology as degenerate and evil and advocates a rabidly romantic return to the glory days of old, frighteningly reminiscent of Pol Pot. They seem not to realize that our government is much less intrusive than that of, say, France, where bed and breakfasts have to be registered with the authorities, who classify the establishments and decide what type of food may be served. Anyone who wants to make music in the Paris subways first has to audition with the Métro authorities, who determine whether the performer is good enough. I could even quip that my major beef against the U.S. government is that it does not adequately protect me from terrorists and criminals.

Mythfits have supported reactionary strongmen in the past: ask any Italian, Spaniard, or German where that got them. The mythical glory days they idealize are based on an artificial prosperity which is due to factors that are unlikely to return. (A future example: whatever Dr. Kevorkian does or does not do, assisted suicide and euthanasia will become widely accepted once the burdensome postwar babies hit decrepitude.) After World War II, along with the global domination inherited virtually by default, Americans also won the economic lottery: since everyone else was prostrate, we were blessed with almost three decades of an insouciance whose bubble was not burst until the Arab oil embargo of the 'seventies. Not only was the pie much bigger than it is now; women and minorities were largely excluded, so white men enjoyed such unprecedented prosperity that they could afford to be racist and sexist. (A historical parallel would be the second half of China's Sung Dynasty, when trade-based riches enabled men to be so dismissive of women's contribution to the labor force that they instituted foot-binding.) The working class was renamed "lower middle class" (never before had factory workers been middle-class), could afford modest versions of rich men's luxuries (second homes, boats, home-bound wives), and tended not to vote, being pacified by prosperity. They did not realize that, like the proverbial second chick in nature programs, labor is only able to do well if capital is sated by exceptional abundance, a situation which has ceased to exist: capitalists have since reverted to predatory behavior reminiscent of robber-baron feudalism, such as gutting pension funds, outsourcing jobs so as to increase profits, and giving CEO's millions of dollars in bonuses. One can almost hear Erich Fromm reminding us that capitalism's ethical contribution is a sense of fairness, or "Adam Smith" and Henry Ford fulminating, "Have you not learnt/haven't you learned anything from what we told you about enlightened self-interest and broad-based prosperity?"

Too bad McVeigh, Kaczynski, and the violent Trump supporters did not have a Sonia to make them beg forgiveness for having sinned against the earth and to tell them that true justice not only does not, but actually cannot exist. The reason, although she does not actually explain it: once a society becomes so large and complex that institutions take the place of one-to-one personal relationships, perfect freedom and justice are subsumed into an impersonal system which becomes so necessary that its occasional lack of congruence with reality is excused. The recent film "Grand Canyon" can easily be viewed as a meditation on the value of institutions in an increasingly impersonal society.

As long as we fail to realize that our societal myth is a convention like any other, we cannot even contemplate, much less implement, the systemic social changes which will soon be necessary if we want to avoid being destroyed by overpopulation, dwindling resources, global warming, staggering pollution levels, and the competitive infighting which will otherwise almost invariably become exacerbated in the near future. Contrary to the belief of reactionary mythfits, the Wild West and its myth of absolute individualism and self-reliance are dangerously outdated; it is time for a new myth.

The biggest slave of all is the one

who mistakenly thinks he is free.

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Capitalism with a Human Face

(An Attempt to Help my Eastern European Friends)

The word "economy" comes from the Greek "oikos" (house) and "nomos" (management). The word "capital" comes from the Latin "caput," meaning "head," i.e. the first or most important thing; for instance, a country's most important city is called its capital, and capital punishment is the kind that makes you lose your head. In terms of economics, it refers to the investment which must be made before a business can start; Communist societies did not want to use the word "capital," so they substituted the term "means of production." However, since the capital has to come from somewhere, it becomes obvious that Communism is also a form of capitalism, except that the investment is made by the government instead of by private individuals. Similarly, the Communists translated Marx's term "Bürger" not as "citizen," which is what it means, but as the insulting "bourgeois." (The word comes from the German "Burg" = fortress or city; a "Bürger" is thus a resident of a city.) There are other terminological divergencies between government capitalism and private capitalism; in the latter, for instance, factory workers are considered part of the middle class, and in the United States they became very conservative with the prosperity that followed World War II. Furthermore, capital is not necessarily money, nor money necessarily capital. A translator's most important capital is literally inside his or her head--the knowledge needed to produce income. If I spend $150 on an evening dress, that is not capital (unless my work requires an evening dress), but if I spend the same $150 on a second-hand typewriter which I can use to generate income by doing translations, it is capital.

Primitive hunter-gatherer and peasant societies of course had no modern economic systems, mostly because they had almost no need or opportunity for storing, saving, or investing. In the absence of money or refrigeration, the best place to store extra food is in someone else's belly; that way, that person will give you food in the future. In what is called a "subsistence ecnomy," relatives are important because they do things for you; for instance, the mother's brother may have the obligation of helping his newlywed nephew build a house. For such people, relationships are their technology, and their wealth is represented by accumulated gratitude or obligations, not money; in other words, it is a form of power. (This was the bitter lesson learned by an American who planned to buy Filipino peasants' rice and sell it at a profit; he did not realize that the landlords had godfatherly power relationships with the peasants.) When a tribe or village is suddenly thrust into a modern economy, the elders typically complain that the young people (who earn most of the money) stop sharing. Our phylogenetic memory of prehistoric cooperation probably explains the romantic attractiveness of Communism, Christianity, and idealistic groups such as Israeli kibbutzim and hippie communes.

Once primitive societies make contact with each other, a certain amount of trading and specialization occurs. For instance, peasants may barter grain in exchange for animals killed by hunters. Many societies also use specific items for a single purpose, such as valuable shells or feathers to pay the bride-price; however, in order to qualify as proper money, a currency has to be good for everything, not just one thing. Furthermore, since peasants actively produce food rather than just taking what nature has to offer, their land is able to support several hundred people per square mile (compared to no more than one for hunter-gatherers) which gives the peasants enormous numerical, and thus military, superiority.

Economic factors greatly influence a society's outlook and religion. For instance, part of the reason Americans value variety and freedom is that they are good for the economy--ironically, people assert their individuality by buying mass-produced products. They think like nomad hunter-gatherers, valuing initiative, freedom, and experimentation even though 90% of new businesses fail within the first year; most Asians think more like peasants, valuing conformity, hierarchy, and stability, which makes sense when you realize that rice-farming requires the obedience of many people. In my opinion, India invented the belief in reincarnation and the caste system because the Aryan invaders had to justify their superiority and power over the vanquished natives.

The decentralized feudal economies of the European Middle Ages needed little money except in the trade-based cities, as the peasants produced most of their own food. The centralized feudal economies of Asia, especially China, are based on a principle called mercantilism, according to which every country or empire selfishly tries to maximize its income at the expense of everyone else. Europe's Protestant Reformation caused many people to defer immediate gratification and save their money for future pleasure or investment--as contrasted with the Polish aristocrats of the 16th-18th centuries, who spent all their money on imported luxuries instead of investing it in future-oriented business. The Industrial Revolution further changed many Western economies from land-based to machine-based.

In 1776, the Scots philosopher Adam Smith (An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) suggested that if blind selfishness is replaced by enlightened self-interest, the "invisible hand" of the market regulates the economy in a manner much more fair than any centralized autocracy. In his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm stated that capitalism's major contribution to ethics has been the idea of fairness. After all, I cannot insist on charging $200 for a pencil if my competition sells the same pencil for 20 cents.

We must underscore that self-interest which is myopic or predatory rather than enlightened will ultimately prove destructive. A few examples: 1) Henry Ford realized that if he paid his workers well, they could afford to buy his cars--in other words, he discovered the value of broad-based prosperity. Today's company executives, who fire thousands of people and give themselves hundred-million-dollar bonuses, fail to realize that all those firings will eventually hurt the economy as a whole, as people cannot be forced to spend money they do not have. ("If no one has a job, who's supposed to buy the stuff?") 2) The competition by which the market regulates itself is not always limited to similar products. For instance, when the telephone company had a monopoly in the U.S. several decades ago, it nevertheless spent millions of dollars a year on advertising. Before you say that it is stupid to advertise when you have a monopoly, please remember that the phone company was one of the richest in the world--and it didn't get that way by being stupid. It realized that if a woman only has $40 to spend and uses it to buy a dress, she cannot spend it on long-distance telephone calls. The phone company was thus in direct competition with the dress company! 3) It is important to see the "big picture." Several years ago a German company sold its fax division to East Asia, reasoning that they did not want to compete with their own telex division. It did not occur to them that Chinese, Japanese, the Indian languages, and Korean do not use the Roman alphabet; for these people, telex technology is as useless as fax technology is useful.

Thus, "market economy" is a better description than "capitalism," since most people do not have capital but do participate in the market. Even those who buy shares of stock in a corporation often do so as a form of gambling rather than in order to attend shareholder meetings and decide on the company's course of action. (Let us point out that society needs a few gamblers--they absorb risks the way ball-bearings absorb friction in mechanics.) Stuart Chase has suggested new words--specuvesting or investulating--to characterize the combination of investment and speculation which drives most so-called capitalists. It is theoretically possible for shares of stock to rise indefinitely, but in practice the price often drops, which creates the phenomenon known as the "bull" or "bear" market (optimistic/ rising prices vs. pessimistic/ falling prices). These terms originated around 1848 among the California gold miners and ranchers: to combat boredom, these brutal people would tie a bull and a bear together, goad them to fight, and bet on which animal would win. They noticed that the bull's strategy was aggressive--to slash from above with his hoofs and horns--while the bear's was defensive--lying down on his back, biting and clawing at the bull's belly from below.

Real life has disproved many of the predictions made in the past by economists, probably because the latter failed to take sufficient account of psychological and social factors. In today's economy, which could be called capitalism without capitalists, most of the exploitation is being done not by the capitalists (the stockholders), but by management (the company executives who fire thousands of people and give themselves obscene bonuses). Workers sometimes exploit their bosses, as in the case of an employee who gets paid for learning the business, saves up his money, and opens a store in competition with his former boss.

However, unconscious market factors are insufficient to regulate every aspect of society; safety, education, and medicine are prime exceptions. Freedom itself in fact requires a certain amount of rules, otherwise fascism takes over: imagine what would happen if there were no traffic lights and road regulations! As a further example, it is "penny-wise and pound-foolish" to hire sailors who know no English to navigate an American river, as they do not comprehend crises and thus cause expensive accidents. There are in fact no "pure" economic systems--they are a matter of degree or continuum. For instance, central planners require a great deal of knowledge and coordination in order to do a good job, otherwise they are trying to regulate something they do not understand; it is better to avoid planning than to pretend to plan. If a society is characterized by macropathy (centralization without coordination), it falls victim to inept managers and self-important bureaucrats. Ideally, management wants things done the best way, whereas workers want to do them the easiest way. It is management's job to make the easiest way identical to the best way, such as using fitted sheets in hotel bedrooms. If management is cruel, however, it is only logical for the workers to form labor unions in self-defense. Similarly, if price alone, not quality, decides all purchases, customers become the lawful prey of unscrupulous purveyors of shoddy goods and services.

We now know that every economic system has its own faults and inconsistencies. In a commercial society, goods are cheaper because of the efficiency of having every worker make only part of a thing; however, the resulting proliferation of non-essentials and luxuries renders the society vulnerable, since there are so many things people can decline to buy if their incomes are depressed. A certain amount of stupidity is actually good for the economy, since it gets people to spend money. As an example, the ideal of feminine beauty needs to be very artificial; if it were natural, women would not buy all those expensive products in order to be beautiful. If being rich enough to live without working becomes the ideal, that produces the kind of useless snobbery satirized in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. By the way, the word "snob" is an abbreviation of "sine nobilitatis," without nobility, appended to the names of rich merchants' sons who were allowed into aristocratic British schools when the latter bowed to the pressure of all that money; as these boys treated their peers with such insufferable condescension, the term "s. nob." acquired its negative meaning.

We have thus seen that economic, social, psychological, and historical factors are much more interdependent than ideologues want us to believe, and that all those economic models bristling with mathematical equations (the subsistence theory, the iron law of wages, etc.) are too artificial to be truly reliable. I like to point out that the U.S. has a Carl Marks of its own (note the different spelling), and he is a stockbroker! In fact, it is my opinion that Communism is a religion (God = Revolution, Church = Party) and that within 300 years the difference between private and government capitalism will be considered as inconsequential as the difference between Athens and Sparta--of interest to no one except historians.

The Passion of the Passion

Since I approach The Passion of the Christ from the viewpoint of comparative literature, not theology, I believe the anti-Semitism controversy is being churned artificially for parochial and sensationalist purposes. (For instance, claiming anti-Semitism on the grounds that the bad guys had hooked noses.) I guess it takes an American and a comparatist to say, "Follow the money trail, both past and present" of what is ultimately a nontroversy. To wit:

Never having met the man, I do not know whether Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic or not, but his film definitely is not. (Even Pope John Paul II said he told it like it was.) He makes it very clear that the group that pressured Pontius Pilate into convicting Jesus was not "the Jews" (as per St. John Ch. 19), but the High Priest's goons, who can hardly be expected to be Scandinavians or Hawaiians. The four Gospels on which the movie is based were four different versions whose purpose was to convert the Jews (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the pagans (John). As a teacher, I can recognize passages which indicate that the writer is clutching at half-remembered phrases because he has not perfectly understood the principle, as when Jesus is telling people to think for themselves rather than obtusely going by the book. In Matthew, he says that if your sheep falls into a well on the Sabbath, don't tell me you're not going to try to get it out. In Luke 14:1-6, the animal in question is a donkey or an ox, and another passage defines the work as watering the livestock, not pulling it out of a well.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because their contents are similar; they were composed in order to evangelize the Jews and are thus respectful of Jewish sensibilities, while John was composed in order to evangelize the pagans and thus did not care that much about hurting Jewish feelings. My general impression: Matthew is attempting to incorporate into Jewish tradition the Messianism and belief in an afterlife which so often surface to comfort oppressed people; Mark stresses Jesus' role as a healer and expeller of unclean spirits; Luke features angels as messengers and prophets and the fulfillment of prophecies (such as 24:26) and has so many embedded songs that I suspect it may have been meant as a narrated stage performance; and John argues that Jesus' death was a fulfillment of Scriptural prophecies (17:12, 18:11, 19:28, 19:36, 20:9). John appears to telescope the Jewish scapegoat tradition (1:29-37, Jesus as the Lamb of God dying for the sins of the world) with the atavistic human sacrifice of Greece's Dionysian tradition. To compare: in Mark 13:14-18, the prophecy in question is the destruction of Jerusalem as a result of the abomination of desolation. Jesus advised the people not to rebel against the occupying power: the Romans are cruel, if you revolt they will cream you. Nobody listened, and forty years later Jerusalem was obliterated.

Obviously for the benefit of pagan converts, John explains Jewish funeral customs (19:40) and translates Jewish words such as Bethesda = Sheep-Pool (5:2-3), Messiah = Christ (1:42, 4:25), Rabbuni = my Master (20:17), and Golgotha = Skullplace (19:17). He explains the holiday of Passover (6:4), specifies that those Jews who brought Jesus to Roman headquarters remained outside so as to avoid defilement at Passover (18:28), and that Jesus was brought to a Roman court because the Sanhedrin court had no capital punishment (18:32).

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, never as the Son of God or the King of the Jews; only other people call him the latter, starting with the astrologers at his birth (Matthew 2:2) and ending with the judges in Matthew 27:11 and the INRI plaque on his cross, the Biblical equivalent of a sneering tabloid headline (Matthew 27:37; John 18:33-9, 19:19). John the Baptist calls him Christ (Matthew 11:2), i.e. the Messiah = Anointed One, perhaps because he baptized him; the only actual reference to anointment I could find in the Gospels was the story of the immoral woman (Luke 7:36 et seq.), later mistakenly identified with Mary Magdalene, who washed his feet with her tears and anointed them with myrrh. Many other people call him Lord, Messiah, Son of God, God's Messiah, and Christ (Mark 1:10, 9:9-12, 10:33-45, 13:26, 14:20-42; Luke 7:33, 9:22-52, 12:8-10, 13:15, 17:22-30, 18:31, 19:10, 21:36, 22:70; John 1:14-18, 1:42, 3:15 et seq., 5:22 et seq., 8:40 et seq., 14:8, 17:1, 20:28, 20:30-1).

All the Gospels say that the Pharisees and doctors of law tried to trip Jesus up with trick questions, such as asking whether taxes should be paid to Rome; he answered that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Matthew 22:17-22, Mark 12:15 et seq., Luke 20:22-6). However, this appears to have been part of the rabbinical tradition of discourse and debate and does not portray Jesus as a threat to the religious establishment or to Rome. That seems to have occurred later (Mark 11:15-16), when he had his temper tantrum about the moneychangers in the temple, which my Israeli tour guide explained was due to the graven image on the Roman coins, something prohibited in the temple. At that point, he became a threat to the economic power of the priests, who managed to adroitly reframe his rant against themselves into a rant against the Roman presence. The High Priest Caiaphas persuaded a crowd to pressure a reluctant Pontius Pilate, whose wife had begged him not to harm this innocent man (Matthew 27:19-20), into executing Jesus in a very public and gory manner as an example to the other Jews: Mess with my economic interests and I'll sic the Romans on you so fast it'll make your head spin.

I am sure that even the most ardent Jews will admit that an individual Jew can be a jerk. Why launch an automatic defense of this power-hungry sadistic priest, as though no co-religionist could possibly do wrong? According to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, anti-Semitism was only invented three centuries later, when the Roman Empire turned Christian and the Church tried to humiliate the Jews into conversion. Crying anti-Semitism where there is none raises the specter of an ugly projection and engenders unnecessary hostility.

The Gospels in no way imply that the Jewish people were in favor of this gruesome crucifixion. They liked Jesus (Matthew 21:46), to the point that on occasion he had to preach from a boat so as to avoid being crushed by the multitude on the lakeshore, and Luke 23:48 documents that after the crucifixion, the crowd went home beating their breasts. John (17:12, 18:11, 19:28, 19:36, and 20:9, among others) and Luke (24:43 et seq.) state that Jesus' purpose was to die for the sins of the world, which leads to the logical conclusion that whoever killed him was therefore a tool of his destiny. My Buddhist friend probably put it best: blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus would be as nonsensical as blaming the American people for the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.

Bible Bibliography

Allegro, John. The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed. New York: Gramercy Publishing, 1956, 1964. First published as The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal, by Penguin Books, 1956.

Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1969, rpt. Avenel 1981.

Aslan, Reza. No god but God. New York: Random House, 2011.

Beekman, John, and Callow, John. Translating the Word of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1974.

Biblical Archaeology Review magazine.

Boman, Thorlef. Hebrew Thought Compared to Greek. Tr. Jules L. Moreau. Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1960.

Bruce, F.F. The English Bible History of Translations from the Earliest English Version to the New Bible. London: Lutterworth Press, 1970.

-, The English Bible: A History of Translations. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

Cambridge University History of the Bible (3 vols.) Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963.

Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Press, 1967.

Draper, Robert, "The Bible Hunters." National Geographic, 12/2018, p. 40 et seq.

Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. William B. Trask, tr. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978, 1982.

Eusebius Pamphili. The Ecclesiastical History. (Also translated as History of the Church.)

Gascogne, Bamber. The Christians. ISBN 0-224-013556 and his series on Granada Television copyrigh 1978.

Graham, Lloyd M. Deceptions and Myths of the Bible. New York: Bell Publishing, 1975.

Graves, Robert, and Patai, Raphael. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. New York: Greenwich House, 1963, 1964, rpt. 1983.

Gregory, C.R., Canon and Text of the New Testament. 1907.

Harrison, G.B. The Bible for Students of Literature and Art. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1964.

Henn, T.R. The Bible as Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

Hogarth MacGregor, George. Jew & Greek: Tutors unto Christ. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936.

Interpreters' Dictionary of the Bible.

Kahle, P.E. The Cairo Geniza. 1st ed. 1947, 2nd ed. 1959.

-, Der hebräische Text. Franz Delitzsch, 1962.

Keller, Werner. The Bible as History. William Neil, tr. New York: William Morrow, 1956. 2nd rev. ed. 1981.

Knox, Wilfred Lawrence. Some Hellenistic Elements in Primitive Christianity. London: 1944.

Knox, Ronald. Trials of a Translator. NY: Sheed & Ward, 1949.

-, On English Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Lost Books of the Bible. New York: Bell Publishing, 1979.

Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restration. New York: Oxford Unib. Press, 1968.

Moulton, Richard G. The Literary Study of the Bible. New York: AMS Press, 1970. (Rpt. from 1899 Boston.)

Mounin, Georges. Die Übersetzung. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967.

Newman, Aryeh. Mapping Translation Equivalence. Leuven, Belgium: Academic Publishing Co., 1980.

Nida, Eugene A. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill, 1964.

Orlinsky, H.M. "The Masoretic Text, a Critical Evaluation." Prolegomenon to the 1966 reissue of C.D Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, 1897.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.

Posner, Gerald. God's Bankers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Ricciotti, Giuseppe. The Life of Christ. Milwaukee: Brace Publishing Co., 1952.

Ready Reference History of the English Bible. New York: Amer. Bible Society, 1979.

Rogers, Francis M. The Quest for Eastern Christians. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.

Savory, Theodore. The Art of Translation. Boston: The Writer Inc., 1968.

Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God & Country. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982.

Sims, Albert E., and Dent, George. Who's Who in the Bible. New York: Philos. Lib., 1982.

Soares, Theodore G. The Origins of the Bible. New York: Harper & Bros., 1941.

Steiner, George. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Trescott, Jacqueline. "Translation: A Multilingual Tower of Babble," International Herald Tribune, October 27, 1982.

Unger, Merrill F. Unger's Bible Handbook. Chicago: Moody, 1966.

United Bible Societies. Fauna and Flora of the Bible and other "helps" for translators, 1972.

Vandervorst, J. Introduction aux textes heubreu et grec de l'ancien Testament. 1935.

VERSION, TRADUCTION, and BIBLE of the 18th-century French Encyclopédie.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part 2: The Dynamics of Social Criticism and Social Change

Table of Contents

Defusing Culture Shock

Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed

Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

Anglos and Insects

The Di is Cast

The American Dream Perverted

A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

Defusing Culture Shock

A good deal of what is called "culture shock" can actually be defused if the underlying rationale is explained. For instance:

Many Americans mistakenly believe that the French are rude; my contention is that this is an almost comical misunderstanding based on a difference in protocol. In the U.S., if a beaming stranger approaches you in the street with a "Good morning, ma'am, how are you today?", you instinctively recoil, fearing that he wants to sell you something, or worse, so Americans are very direct so as to avoid rejection ("Where's the post office, please?") In France, you will meet with hostility in the absence of such friendly overtures. The French thus interpret American directness as rudeness and react accordingly. My experience has been that if the protocol is followed, many Frenchmen will actually go out of their way to help you (within a single week, on two occasions ladies invited us to follow them when my husband and I got lost on vacation).

Such protocol differences can also affect labor practices. I once had to interpret for a factory manager who was about to fire a Hispanic worker for insolence but decided to try to find out first what actually happened. The worker had left early Friday to be with his highly pregnant wife, and when he came in on Monday his colleague told him, "the boss is mad at you and wants to see you." The worker started working, and the boss was furious--"why didn't he come into my office?" After interpreting the questions and answers for a while, I asked for and was granted permission to explain that from my experience, a Hispanic worker never goes barging into the boss' office unannounced; he respectfully waits to be called. The boss was surprised: "I have a cultural problem!"

Another time, when at a translators' convention in a New York hotel, I asked a group of workers how to get to my conference room and formally thanked them when they gave me the information. One of them thereupon said to his colleagues in Spanish, "You see? Not even a smile from that one." I wanted to answer, "In this country it's the employee who needs to smile, not the customer. Besides, how would you like it if your wife smiled at two dozen strange men?" But then I bit my tongue--why further antagonize an already hostile roomful of men?

In "Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village," p. 128, author Gillian Gillison documented how, after hours of work, she was "feeling painfully hot and thirsty" but was ignored when sugarcane was passed around. When she told her daughter how hurt that made her feel, the little girl said, "'Mommy, were you smiling?' She said yes, of course, in anticipation of the refreshing sugarcane. 'Well, that's why you didn't get any. Nobody has to give you anything to please you when you are already pleased. When I want something, I frown and look away. Then I always get a lot, so I won't be angry.'" Children are the best cultural anthropologists in the world!

Similarly, on p. 137 of "Arctic Dreams & Nightmares," which chronicled the extreme odyssey of a Norwegian and a South African crossing the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian struck the South African "as rigid and sometimes arrogant." When they had a "gentlemanly tête-à-tête" about the issue, they realized it was a matter of cross-cultural miscommunication: the Norwegian "explained that the Scandinavian culture was one of few words... and that [r]emarks [the South African] had experienced as criticism... [had been] intended as advice."

My husband told me about an American schoolteacher who knew Spanish but refused to speak it in class because she thought the Hispanic students were laughing at her. He advised her to consider the possibility that the kids were giggling in delighted surprise, and upon closer observation, she realized that this was true.

Raised under democracy, Americans often encounter trouble abroad because they exhibit insufficient humility before officious officials. Divergent interpretations of body language become an issue here: making eye contact is a sign of radiant integrity in the United States ("I have nothing to hide"), but insufferable cheek in a more feudal society, where the reaction tends to be "how dare the likes of you look me in the eye, you're supposed to bow your head humbly." (This actually happened to me in Italy.)

Conversely, people raised in a dictatorship learn not to protest if treated unfairly so as to avoid being singled out for even more savage mistreatment; they prefer to suffer quietly, at most working surreptitiously around the edges. However, such noble silence can cause you to lose a case in the U.S. egalitarian court system, where failure to object is interpreted as acceptance, which actually happened to Olga, a Romanian friend of mine. (Diametrically opposite interpretations of silence!) Edward Hall (p. 80 ff.) documents how ethnic differences in approach to judicial flexibility and family conections can have destructive results even within a single society.

Analogous differences can also invade the personal sphere. Olga, my Romanian friend, once had an argument with my husband as to whether Paul Newman was entitled to refuse a fan his autograph; she said he was not, he said he was. I listened to the back-and-forth yes-no yapping but said nothing, so she finally asked me for my opinion. "No offense," I said, "but this is a boring argument because it is political. You are discussing whether an artist is public property or not. That would depend on the society--such as whether it is fascist or democratic."

Another Olga story: she invited a small Romanian contingent to a party I was giving. When I brought around the hors d'oeuvre, one of the Romanian ladies declined, and Olga had to explain, while laughing, that in Romania the guest is expected to be coy and refuse the food, whereupon the hostess is expected to insist. "If you want it," she explained in Romanian, "accept it right away. This is an American hostess; she won't ask you again."

Shirley MacLaine and friends made a documentary on their trip to China several decades ago called "The Other Half of the Sky." In one of the scenes, when asked what they looked for in a husband, the Chinese women uniformly answered "the correct political attitude," while the Americans valued things like good looks or a sense of humor and thereupon marvelled at the vastly different expectations. I contend that the ostensibly divergent husbandly attributes are actually an instance of style rather than substance: in both countries, the women wanted husbands with qualities which would make them succeed, or at least survive. My Chinese friend Fan added that the women were probably told what to say anyway.

On a related note: in North America the definition of a friend tends to be "someone who doubles your joys and halves your sorrows." Since you can openly buy just about everything in this society, friends are usually not needed for strictly utilitarian purposes. In pre-1989 Poland, however, people would make friends with someone they didn't particularly like, as friendship was defined as helping each other. For instance, one person "made friends" with a rather obnoxious fellow who worked at a gas station whose cousin worked at a meat-packing plant, which of course entailed buying underground meat at the gas station. My Chinese friend Fan said that in her country, friendship is defined more along the lines of that Polish example.

As for international friendship: Latinos in countries south of the border with Mexico often mistakenly believe that U.S. citizens are insulting them: "how come they call only themselves Americans, whereas we [Colombians, Argentines, etc.] are Americans too." This is a misunderstanding: in English there are seven continents, in Spanish only five (Antarctica doesn't count, and the Americas are considered a single continent, namely America). The problem is not the torpedoing of two continents, but the difference in classification; no insult whatsoever is intended.

Other classificatory misunderstandings typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities. For instance, in a 'seventies article on Mishima, Esquire magazine adduced the fact that the Japanese "hai" means both "yes" and "no" as an example of Oriental inscrutability. But "hai" actually means "the preceding is correct" ("right" or "affirmative" would be a better translation), which eliminates the supposed yes-no mystery entirely. If you ask a Japanese "Don't you drink?" and he answers "Yes," he means "You are correct, I don't drink." Make sure you do not phrase your questions in the negative!

Another classification example: True freedom requires rules. For instance, imagine what would happen to our roadways if there were no traffic regulations: bullies would quickly turn the resulting chaos into fascism. This is hard to explain to Russians because their language has no word exactly corresponding to our "freedom," only volnya (doing whatever you feel like, even at someone else's expense) and svoboda (essentially the absence of restrictions on movement, which makes sense because serfs were legally bound to the land). A typical Russian is thus likely to think Americans are not free because they have to obey rules.

Lastly, I also have identified some surprising underlying causative factors, such as that unsupportive labor practices in the U.S. helped Americans to identify with Princess Diana, and have explained this hypothesis in "The Di Is Cast." See also "Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom" for an analysis of how non-homologous aspects can nevertheless have analogous functions.

There are of course many other sources of culture shock, such as technology and the warping of the original intent of a system. Some of these are touched upon in this series of essays, as in "Gynetic Engineering," "When Bush Comes to Shove," and "Au Pair Means Everybody Wins."

Bibliography

Del Giudice, Marguerite, "Arctic Dreams & Nightmares." National Geographic, January 2007, p. 130 ff.

Gillison, Gillian, "Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village." National Geographic, July 1977.

Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language. New York: Fawcett, 1959.

Snowdon, Sondra. The Global Edge: How your company can win in the international market place. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

As a young girl, I avidly read books on philosophy because I thought they would help me acquire wisdom. But then I realized how many philosophers there were, and how they often contradicted each other; they reminded me of soapbox men on Prophets Row, each of them shouting, "Listen to me, I have all the answers," whereas I knew they couldn't all be right, and quite possibly none of them was. With the onset of maturity came the realization that life is meaningless in and of itself, except for self-preservation (prolonging a meaningless life) and species preservation (creating another meaningless life). I understood that philosophy basically tries to impart meaning to the meaningless, claiming that "life makes sense if you view it this way," which presupposes that the type of society in which the philosopher is living is a major factor in its structure and purpose. A rich, carefree nation is likely to be epicurean, whereas a poor and deprived one will probably espouse stoicism. Taking this knowledge to its logical conclusion: philosophy should therefore be a subcategory of cultural anthropology, which was my almost-major as an undergraduate.

When working on my terminal degree in comparative literature, especially when adding my personal experience of having been raised in about half a dozen different cultures and languages, I observed with fascination that similar functions could be served by various means in different societies, much as biological functions can be served by analogous as well as homologous organs. (Multiculturals are probably more creative than others, having learned by the age of two that there is no single correct way to do or say anything any more than there is a single correct way to cook carrots.) For me, the most interesting phenomenon was that of wit or humor, probably because I associated it with my American teachers, who appeared almost stratospherically serene, logical, humorous, and dignified in a postwar European world full of resentment and deprivation.

After moving to the States in the late 1960's, I started wondering about the purpose of this humor--what is it for?--especially since so many Americans seemed to be of the opinion that people without a sense of humor would probably go crazy, something I had never heard any European say. (Although one Colombian did quip that Americans crack jokes even on their deathbeds.) Then I learned that in a country in which there is so much personal and economic freedom and people are always trying to do better, there is likely to be a chasm of potentially dangerous divergence between ambition and reality, one requiring something to bridge the disappointent gap, such as the humorous pretense that no setback is a big deal. But isn't it confusing cause and effect to say that if you make fun of something, it can't hurt you? I suspect it is a way of thinking "reality can't touch me," analogous to the disguised indifference of those Most Serene Highnesses of old.

Humor can absorb the resulting friction in a manner analogous to ball-bearings in mechanics: the individual takes responsibility for his failure and does not blame the impersonal system. Making fun of a danger further helps take the fear away--how can something so ridiculous possibly hurt you? I concluded that the function of humor in American society is to prevent the conflict which would normally result from disappointment, insecurity, and fear.

So how do other societies cope with these issues? Many groups practice witchcraft: sticking pins in your nemesis' namesake doll makes you feel powerful and fearless while simultaneously preventing overt conflict. And living in a repressive dictatorship can squelch a sense of humor: with everybody blindly obeying in a strict hierarchy, there is no need for a chasm-bridging mechanism that might even be dangerous to the top dogs. People existing in such rigid circumstances tend to develop a philosophical attitude of passive obedience which quickly acquires the label of wisdom; prayer can make the downtrodden feel better and keep them too busy to engage in counterproductive violence. The Greeks had a word for it: sophrosyne, meaning proper and measured behavior, knowing one's limitations and one's place, and above all avoiding hubris. Interestingly enough, the downtrodden sometimes develop a wicked sardonic sense of humor which they use to poke fun at the authorities in private.

It is probably no coincidence that the Germans have become more humorous now that their society is so much more fluid, as exemplified in a German-language newspaper cartoon: A mother mouse is teaching her baby to stay inside the hole if they hear the cat meowing; he obeys. Later, however, they hear the dog barking, and the mother says, "It's all right, you can go out, 'cause if the dog is there, the cat won't be." The baby mouse goes out and finds that it's the cat barking. Last frame: the contented cat cleans his whiskers and remarks, "It pays to know a foreign language." When I told this joke to people from Tibet and Taiwan, they reacted with an immediate broad grin; the mainland Chinese response was, "I don't understand. The cat was in a foreign country?" My Taiwanese friend explained to me that the mainlanders pursue conformity so rabidly that they don't have much of a sense of humor.

Over the years I collected enough research to fill a master's thesis on this topic in anthropology, one which would probably have met with approval ("the structural-functionalists would eat that right up"). However, after a while I felt I would simply be documenting the obvious, besides which my graduate work was not in anthropology, but in comparative literature. The current fashion in the latter discipline is to deny (or at least downplay) any interrelationship between social and literary factors because, as adduced in my essay "Recalibrating Literary Criticism," I believe Western literary critics wanted to negate the didactic socialist-realism substratum of Soviet-bloc literature.

So instead I did my master's thesis on translation theory and my doctoral dissertation on the Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian, which was probably a wittier, witchier, and wiser decision, not to mention much more productive.

USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed (copyright International Law Review, 1992; reprinted by kind permission)

In a recent Time magazine special on the USA, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes was quoted as saying that what Americans do best is understand themselves; what they do worst is understand others. This statement could easily apply to any nation or corporation enjoying an artificial hegemony, from the Roman Empire to the major car manufacturer of your choice. Subsequent to World War II, after all, we inherited economic and political dominance virtually without asking for it, meaning that we had the luxury of writing in English to, say, an Argentine eager to buy our products, and expecting him to answer in English. And he would. Ever since the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 hostage situation, however, it has become apparent that the umbrella we are standing under is leaky, and that the only reason we did not get wet before was that it had not been raining. I am hoping that the members of the Board of USA, Inc. will consider modifying their corporate strategy to include a better understanding of other peoples, not just their resources; one need not he an Arab to resent being treated like raw material. As a translator with some cross-cultural experience and "insider's insight," may I humbly offer a few suggestions for possible inclusion in such an agenda.

Firstly, may I suggest that decision-makers consult a greater variety of people to avoid the danger of listening to nobody except their own clones. In the "Jeffersons" TV series some fifteen years ago, for instance, Louise wondered why the input of her neighbor, the interpreter Bentley, was ignored at his workplace, namely the United Nations; he answered along the lines of "I don't tell them what to do, I just tell them what they said." Actually, good translators and interpreters may well have a wealth of cross-cultural information which would help their clients understand others. For instance, I recently interpreted in a labor situation wherein an Ecuadorian was being punished for not having told his boss that he had to leave early. The next workday, his co-worker told him, "They're mad at you and want to see you." His boss could not understand why he did not appear in his office immediately, and took that to signify an admission of guilt or a gesture of defiance. After interpreting the questions and answers for a while and asking whether I might say something, I was allowed to explain my understanding of the underlying problem. Namely, a Hispanic worker will never come barging into his boss' office unannounced; he always waits to be called. Once this cultural problem was perceived, both parties were able to settle their differences amicably. Similarly, differences in business techniques may be part of the Arab-US problem; we tend to think in terms of take it or leave it, all or nothing, whereas the Arabs consider everything negotiable and nothing definitive. You must never ask an Arab merchant the price of something out of idle curiosity; he will pursue you for six blocks until he has made the sale, even if the price drops 80%.

This is merely one example of an attempt to understand the mentality of other nations. Others could range from obvious truisms, such as that the Arabs are much better at persistent waiting than the Americans, to recondite hypotheses worth analyzing, such as that a pointedly proper pastoral culture like the Arabs can probably come no closer to Western-style democracy at the moment than Colonel Ghaddafi's quasi-religious socialism. I suspect that the government of any nation is just the family structure writ large--an authoritarian family, in this case.

Secondly, I feel that international competition should make us rethink our attitude in terms of cause and effect, not merely intensify the approach we erroneously believe led to our prosperity. In other words: we were not great because we acted the way we did; we had the luxury of behaving thus because we were great. But we now have too much competition to expect everyone else to adapt to us, e.g. continue importing our non-metric appliances or answering our correspondence in English. We need to learn other languages; after all, what would a Detroit mogul do if sent spare-parts bids in German or Japanese?

I believe language learning is deficient in this country not because the teaching system is defective (it works just fine elsewhere), but because American students are unmotivated in this direction. (Any attempt to improve language learning by technical means thus strikes me as analogous to performing sex therapy upon a loveless marriage.) Until recently, the stigma of being an immigrant made people ashamed of speaking a foreign language. Today's students expect school to be entertaining; they will not learn the hard realities of lost jobs and negative balances of payment until later. I hope it will not be too late.

The political corollary thereto: we should also rethink our international policy to reflect the reality that our viewpoint is not the only one, and perhaps not even the decisive one among many. For instance, those who thought the Iranian hostage crisis was just an isolated incident have been proved abundantly wrong by more recent events. Instead of treating such items as unpleasantnesses which will go away if ignored long enough (under the assumption that not even the most fanatic of mullahs can remain high on hate forever), we should institute a retrospective analysis. We need to see what can be learned from such situations and what impact they may have upon a new and improved long-term foreign policy. For instance, we must understand that according to Muslim convention, it is the men who are expected to be emotional; the women are raised to be hard-headed realists. One of my Arab friends phrases it very succinctly: women handle the family finances in Arab countries, so a wife is her husband's bank, moderating his impulsiveness with prudent caution.

Thirdly, we should also address the deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade in terms of the loss of artificial prosperity. Phrasing the situation in family terms: after World War II, we won the lottery. Instead of investing the money in the future, however, we became accustomed to a higher standard of living and expected it to last forever. In my opinion, the saddest element in this analogy is that the parents have become so spoiled and irresponsible that they now raid their children's trust fund rather than modify their lifestyle.

Fourthly, I believe it necessary to change the corporate thinking which makes us small and silent stockholders in USA, Inc. (an analogy abundantly applicable to the Savings & Loans debacle, among others). I believe we should start with the unquestioned acceptance of personnel rotation. Our State Department, military organizations, and major multinationals tend to transfer employees and their families every few years, which discourages mingling with the natives and learning their language and encourages careerist callowness. Having grown up among "Army brats" and soldiers abroad, I am distinctly aware that they are impatient to sip an idealized hometown soda for the rest of their lives. I believe at least part of the My Lai mentality could have been attributed to the same resentful contempt--if it weren't for you (gooks, Krauts, whatever), I could be "home" right now. How much empathy, linguistic and cultural proficiency, or predictive power can be accumulated by a corporate executive, Army officer, or career diplomat for whom his present stint is merely a stepping-stone to better things?

One very articulate corporate wife I know has justified such transfer-happiness by pointing out that American parents do not want their daughters marrying locals because that would create too much physical distance between family members. However, she does not realize two things: (1) she need not be separated from her daughter at all if her husband's company keeps them where they are, and (2) her argument may be an excellent reason for accepting corporate policy, but is unlikely to be a major factor in setting it.

The major historical precedents for frequent transfers I was able to find were the administrative and military apparatus of ancient Rome, which encouraged standoffishness at all costs, and that of the USSR, whose functionaries could not endure too many years among hostile subjects. Is either of these an example we want to follow? We might rather emulate the fabulously successfuly Japanese, who value assimilation to such a degree that newly arrived executives receive specific instructions to do no work at all until the know the lay of the land. They thus spend a year or two learning to play the guitar, cultivating friendships, and mastering the local language. Furthermore, they are not transferred elsewhere every few years, so their knowledge makes them valuable and subtle tools instead of cavalier bulldozers.

The fifth point requires a domestic analogy, namely child abuse. One of my friends raises his children in a very authoritarian manner. That means they go haywire whenever they come to visit me. I thus have the choice of cleaning up the mess, refusing to invite them, or imposing strict discipline when they visit; none of these alternatives is acceptable to me, since I respect these children and sympathize with their anguishing need for an outlet. If I were a trained therapist, however, I could encourage them to confront their abusive father, even at the risk of having them turn on me temporarily.

Something similar seems to have occurred on an international scale beginning with the 1979 hostage situation. The Iranians, long denied their human rights under the Shah and ignored by the USA, were prime examples of the fact that suffering evidently does not necessarily ennoble people; they violated every major United Nations convention and applauded such violations.1/ Ethnocentrism aside, it is obvious that they interpreted our restraint and food shipments as "weakness"; as in Vietnam, we had the power but were unable to use it. The Iranians also seemed not to realize that in the West only criminals, insane persons, and children ever behave the way they did; Iraq seems to have learned nothing from the Iranian experience, except that its activities are generating more than just a flurry of U.N. papers. Nor does our State Department understand how Muslims think (cf. Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind). As is the case with my friend's children, unless we are experienced in international therapy, our options will be disagreeable: cleaning up after the Middle East, refusing to deal with it, or imposing iron rule--if we hope that human rights and ethics are somehow contagious, we are sadly attempting to clap with one hand, hamstrung by our own scruples and our insufficient understanding of other cultures. Any government is just the family writ large, so authoritarian families are unlikely to produce a political democracy.

As a cororally, I believe the above analogy is also applicable to Eastern Europe, since Communism can be viewed as the macrosocial equivalent of child abuse. We should not expect the recently liberated East Europeans to be cooperative and grateful--at least not until "therapy" has helped them understand how their spirit was deformed in the past. Perhaps we can plan our options better by observing what will inevitably happen in the reunited Germany now that the honeymoon is over; any marriage between a self-confident, slightly overbearing city slicker raised by the Americans and a suspicious, resentful country girl raised by the Russians is bound to present some problems. I am sure we can learn from Germany's mistakes and solutions, just as the EU could learn a good deal from the US federative experience.

Sixth, I believe we need to formulate a foreign policy more long-term, coherent, and sensible than our present almost blind support for any leader who makes the right noises and allows Americans with a predatory short-term gain mentality preferred access to his markets (creating a resentment which can easily close such markets in the long run). Why not bring to international relations the same hardheaded, holistic opportunism for which our businessmen are so famous? The Soviets, for instance, openly practiced the carrot-and-stick policy, demanding concessions in return for aid. I also think that being fair to those who do not deserve it is fascism in reverse: vulgar bullies take over when ethical thinkers are too predictably nice. Without a firm and coherent foreign policy, we will simply be encouraging fascist crooks with no respect for human life to benefit from the international equivalent of Miranda.2/

My seventh opinion is that we should accept more input from social scientists and less from idealogues, as occurred when anthropologists advised US policymakers on how to treat Japan after World War II.3/ For instance, this amateur anthropologist feels that part of the US-USSR problem derived from a difference in mentality: we think like hunter-gatherers (the economy as nature--anything goes, and we take what it has to offer), while the Soviets think like peasants (the economy as a garden, wherein nothing grows unless it has the gardener's specific permission to exist). We thus strike them as dangerous and unpredictable gamblers, whereas they strike us as armies of dangerously obedient serfs.

In anthropological terms, I would say that the overall conflict between communism and capitalism is fundamentally a religious war. (Even the term "propaganda" has religious origins: it was Counter-Reformationese for "propagating the faith.") The French sociologist Emile Durkheim said that in any society, God IS society--i.e. is coterminous therewith. Under both the private and state capitalism, God is society is the economy, as poignantly indicated in expressions such as the "high priests" of finance and the "inner sanctum" of boardrooms. In the final analysis, whether the government controls the economy or the economy controls the government boils down to a chicken-and-egg situation of global proportions.

Finally, understanding others can also make us understand ourselves better. Perceiving distinctions between style and substance can help us untangle some of our own inconsistencies, e.g.: although democracy may not be able to legislate love, it can legislate minimum standards of acceptable conduct. But in order to achieve true fairness, some differentiation must be made between democracy and mere rampant populism. (Switzerland, Periclean Athens, and the early United States were wrong in assuming they could achieve such a distinction by excluding women, children, racial minorities, slaves, foreigners, and non-propertied adult males from the demos.) If our own petty sharks misuse beautiful principles such as free speech in the most degrading and mercenary manner conceivable--pornography and sensationalism clearly demonstrate that free commerce, not free speech, is at issue--how can we expect militant fanatics to understand our concept of ethical restraint?

We have thus come full circle to Carlos Fuentes' comment about Americans' lack of understanding for others: we cannot even understand what we used to be ourselves, in terms of transgenerational fashion in human psychology. After all, 300 years ago, when puritanical preachers were frothing at the mouth spitting fire and brimstone, the late Ayatollah would have been considered normal, and the hostages would have been perceived as sacrifices for the glory of God rather than the victims of a maniac.

FOOTNOTES

1/ Specifically, Iran violated all of the following: Articles 4 and 7 of the U.N. Convention on Prevention and Punishment, which impose upon the receiving State the duty to prevent conspiracies and attempts on the lives and personal dignity of foreign officials, and to punish such attempts (instead of applauding them, as the Iranians did); Articles 29 and 40 of the Vienna Diplomatic and Consular Conventions respectively, which dictate abstention towards officials of foreign States, the use of increased protection for them, and the institution of special precautionary measures to avoid common crimes of international significance; the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Diplomatic Convention concerning compulsory settlement of disputes, and the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights between the United States and Iran.

2/ This Supreme Court ruling in the United States in effect states that a person's arrest is impermissible unless he is apprised of his right to remain silent, as any answers to questions may be used against him subsequently in court, a technicality which is said to have set many criminals free.

3/ Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Further, see Patterns of Culture, also published by Houghton Mifflin in 1934. Both books have been reprinted in paperback.

Many works on cross-cultural subjects have appeared in the recent past. A few examples:

Snowdon, Sondra. The Global Edge: How Your Company can Win in the International Marketplace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Harris, Philip R, and Moran, Robert. Managing Cultural Difference: High-Performance Strategies and Today's Global Manager. Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1987.

Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

The so-called "nanny trials" of the recent past have failed to treat the most important issue, especially as regards press coverage: the young women in question are not nannies at all, but "au pairs," an Anglicized French term which means "evenly matched" (i.e. a virtual barter wherein everybody wins). The original idea was an exchange of daughters so that the girls could learn about a foreign culture in a safe and supervised manner. The system was instituted so that young students could live with a family, receiving free room and board in exchange for being a mother's helper. I myself was an au pair in Spain in 1966, giving the children a few hours' worth of German conversation practice a day for my room and board; no money ever changed hands. Since the mothers were homemakers and there were at least two maids per family, the only work I ever did was wash my own underwear. (However, even then I heard horror stories of au pairs being exploited by British families who could not afford proper maids.)

Now that so many mothers are working outside the home, however, the system has become seriously warped by contradictory expectations and truly needs to get back to its own basics. The USIA and EF agencies prominently feature "information" and "education" in their names and advertisements, which I believe misrepresents reality and recruits the wrong type of person. Enticed with prospects of learning about a foreign culture, au pairs instead find themselves baldly touted as child-care on the cheap, often working in isolation with no company except infants and television. It is clearly exploitative to make an inexperienced teenaged babysitter, and a foreign one at that, responsible for running a household full-time; a certain amount of resentment is thus to be expected. I am frankly surprised that the parents would want such child-care, especially given what we now know about early childhood development, and that the au pairs hold up as well as they do.

When helping Joyce Egginton research her Circle of Fire (about the "Swiss nanny" trial), I translated portions of Karl Jaspers' dissertation (Collected Works in Psychopathology, published posthumously in 1963): the future philosopher examined cases of "homesickness criminals" from circa 1795 to the early 20th century. Most of these were very young girls (many of them pre-pubescent) whose indigent parents had sent them away to earn their keep caring for the children of more well-to-do people. Suffering from intense and crippling homesickness, the girls literally craved to go home; typically, the employers did not object, but the parents did not want them back. Reading between the lines, I realized that the girls felt trapped and that the only way they would be allowed (that word kept cropping up) back home would be to change objective reality. Their feelings were considered worthless, but nobody could argue with a dead baby or a burned-down house. Most modern au pairs are much more mature, but it is virtually inevitable for a few to be unstable.

In my opinion, the system needs to be re-evaluated for truth in advertising, with a clear distinction being drawn between au pairs and nannies (trained, well-paid professionals). The agencies should stop luring recruits under false pretenses, such as equating infant care with cultural adventure. Alternatives must be examined. A promising one might be hiring ex-welfare mothers as housekeepers; they need the work and are statistically more likely to have parenting experience, besides which they know the local language, customs, and 911 drill. After all, people who can afford proper nannies will hardly wish to further their own careers by exploiting young girls.

I believe au pairs would do and feel a lot better rendering companionship and physical assistance to lucid elderly shut-ins with a standard accent in exchange for room, board, a modest allowance, and English lessons; the au pairs would presumably learn more about the language and country from a senior than from a baby, and the elders would probably feel thrilled to be useful, have an attentive companion, and be able to get around more. However, this solution would probably entail a legislative change, as the present USIA au-pair laws are geared specifically toward child care, according to my Congresswoman.

Anglos and Insects

Philip and Belinda Haas' 1995 film "Angels and Insects," based on A.S. Byatt's 1992 novella Morpho Eugenia, draws an analogy between the inexorable, dreamy majesty of blind instinct among insects and the often abusive hedonism of the 19th-century English nobility. May I point out a similar insectlike blindness on the part of other Anglos, namely present-day Americans, and warn that such attitudes and behavior can have consequences much more destructive than the purely domestic injustices of the Victorian era's luxurious human beehives. Any tradition can become dangerous if it is blind; this also applies to young traditions such as the modern one of taking postwar prosperity for granted, especially when coupled with the belief that if we act like we did fifty years ago, we will be as great as we were then (which in my opinion confuses cause and effect).

After World War II, along with the world domination inherited virtually by default, Americans also won the economic lottery: since everyone else was prostrate, we were blessed with almost three decades of an artificial prosperity whose bubble was not burst until the Arab oil embargo of the 'seventies. Not only was the pie much bigger than it is now; women and minorities were excluded. White men enjoyed such unprecedented prosperity that they could afford to be dismissive and supercilious to wives whose economic contribution they did not need. The working class was renamed "lower middle class" (never before had factory workers belonged to the middle class) and was able to afford modest versions of rich man's luxuries (second homes, boats, home-bound wives); it tended not to vote, being pacified by prosperity. The lower middle class did not realize that, like the proverbial second chick in nature documentaries, it can only thrive while resources are exceptionally plentiful; capitalism tends to favor profit and treat labor as a virtual stepchild.

This sounds suspiciously analogous to the world of insects. Imagine you buy a plastic bag of some sort of grain and forget it on the top shelf of the pantry. A year later, when you find the burst plastic in the corner, nothing is left except a pile of excrement powder and empty exoskeletons: the bag had contained insect eggs which subsequently hatched. Faced with this unexpected bonanza, the insect population overproliferated, and when they ran out of food, they all died.

Something similar seems to have started to happen in the U.S. in the past few decades, exacerbated by cheap foreign labor and by the fact that technology makes "electronic immigration" possible. (Ironically, an Indian in Bangalore can thus work for an American company in Miami, which (s)he would be prohibited from doing if physically in the USA without a work permit.) Thirty years ago in New York, people who spoke no English could find a job more easily than native-born college graduates can now--which has made Americans increasingly predatory, unethical, and combative since the mid-'seventies ushered in economic desperation among a people spoiled by three decades of artificial prosperity. (When I was young, the Germans seemed irritable, resentful, and pedantic, while the Americans appeared logical, dignified, and humorous; now it's the Canadians and the Germans who strike me as relaxed and reasonable. I guess it's easy to be nice when you're prosperous.) Employers are dropping people they have used for decades, and outsourcing or hiring cut-rate neophytes so as to maximize profits, taking advantage of this new Third World labor force with no more compunction than a housewife buying her milk from a new grocery store at 7 cents a quart cheaper. (For instance, translations and computer work are already being outsourced to Asia, following the textile, automotive, electronics, and computer programming jobs exported earlier.) Unless translators are willing to work for rates lower than twenty years ago, when everything cost one-third as much as it does now, they do not work.

According to anthropologists, the most violent groups are those who have lost their privileged position and want it back, which probably explains the political rage of newly underemployed or unemployed Americans. Whether by voting or violence, they vent their frustration at being deprived of what they refuse to understand was not a birthright at all, but a historical fluke, and tend to do so in a manner which is at best similar to the thoughtless thumbs watching Roman gladiatorial fights, and at worst militantly reactionary, with bombs being used to mourn the glory days of old.

Furthermore, dwindling resources make Americans more prone to conflict, especially the seemingly pointless harassment whose actual purpose is to establish or maintain dominance. I expect an increase in violence in the future until those formerly privileged become convinced of the need for a systemic change in mentality (from greater aggressiveness to greater efficiency), an unlikely proposition. To elucidate: Americans think like hunter-gatherers rather than peasants. In terms of anthropology, HG's are small bands of 25-50 nomads whose diet is 20% game hunted by the men and 80% vegetation gathered by the women. Since they only consume what nature has to offer instead of actively producing food, or even storing it to a significant degree, population density is usually limited to about 1 person per square mile. If the group becomes too large for the environment to support, it splits to form independent bands if the food source permits. HG's value initiative, individuality, and independence because their economy needs experimentation and innovation, so they raise their children to think for themselves and take chances. (Similarly, Americans are willing to go into business despite the fact that 90% of all new ventures fail within the first year.)

Once resources dry up and there is noplace left to migrate, however, HG's turn on each other (infanticide and warfare), thereby eliminating all but the most brutal members of the society. Thus, around 1980, there was a mugging spree in the Times Square area; once the criminals ran out of victims to rob, the bigger muggers turned on the smaller ones and relieved them of their loot. Some historians believe Easter Island became virtually depopulated in a similar fashion once food supplies ran out and there were no more trees for building boats. I expect analogous destructive infighting once the baby-boomers get blamed for the implosion of Social Security and Medicare, when the actual culprit was the enronization of those funds for purposes of counterproductive warfare.

Peasants, on the other hand, value conformity and security, view challenge as a threat rather than an opportunity, and discourage independence. Since they actively produce and store food instead of merely foraging, they are able to support a much greater population density; since they raise their children to be obedient hardware, they usually gain military superiority over the numerically insignificant HG's, which explains why most of the world's people think like peasants. For instance, China could never afford to be as tolerant as the U.S., where there is room enough for everybody and loners can make a living unassisted. The transition from a hunter-gatherer to a peasant mentality is lost in the mists of prehistory, but must have been rather traumatic unless it was very gradual.

Furthermore, societies develop elaborate attitudinal structures to get their members to act a certain way--and ethnocentrically assume there is no other. (For instance, it is easy for us to quip that the Slavs have raised suffering to an art form--and fail to realize that Americans have raised silliness to an art form.) Anthropologists say that the function of myth is to explain why things are the way they are and cannot be otherwise, thus justifying society--and betraying the individual almost by definition. Our society, for instance, encourages people to overcome impossible obstacles by denying the latters' existence (or at least their subjective validity), a movie-of-the-week attitude which I consider responsible for the death of a child pilot some years ago. We fail to realize that we are not nearly as omnipotent or as much in control of circumstances as our log-cabin myth wants us to believe so as to make us assume personal responsibility for everything without questioning the impersonal system in any way.

Myth makes it easy for an astute demagogue to manipulate people by making the right noises and telling them what they want to hear, as when school-voucher supporters use words like "freedom" and "choice" to exonerate administrative failure and replace a public trust with market values, as though inadequate public education were somehow liberating. The lower middle class has apparently been so thoroughly bamboozled that since 1980 it has almost consistently voted its self-image of Western-movie independence instead of its self-interest, as though an underdog could become a top dog by association. The phenomenon I call the fantasy power trip is apparently quite ancient and well-established, from Hindus worshipping Shiva to Englishmen identifying with James Bond to voodoo practitioners trying to achieve some supernatural control.

Myth usually becomes consolidated into some form of religion, which typically starts out as love and poetry and winds up as bookkeeping and control. Since its primary function is social control, religion does not always require the supernatural or an anthropomorphized deity, as evidenced by Communism or the popular religions of China. Even something as secular as the labor movement follows this pattern to a certain degree: the original idealistic "be nice to your workers" quickly became institutionalized into "exactly what do you mean by that?" when CEO's tried to define the absolute minimum of what they would be expected to contribute.

Speaking of CEO's, the most pervasive insect damage is being perpetrated by political and business leaders who are selling their own people down the river so as to maximize their own power and wealth, like 17th-century Polish noblemen and Cossack elected representatives; the consequences to the latter were loss of national sovereignty and power. I fear the economic results are likely to bankrupt the US within 25 years: why are we financing our potential enemies, why is Medicare and Social Security money being given to crony contractors instead of universal health care, why don't politicians make outsourcing illegal, and who's supposed to buy the stuff if nobody has a job any more? Ironically, the same arch-conservatives who formerly boycotted anything made in a Communist country are now outsourcing American jobs to the People's Republic of China just so they can give themselves $300 million in bonuses instead of a mere $200 million; forty years ago that would probably have gotten them lynched for high treason.

Finally, purely statistical and historical factors may prove much more important than social attitudes, economics, or even legislation. Before becoming impotent empires some centuries ago, China and the Arabs were so dominant that the Koreans could not even invest a new crown prince without Ming approval; the Chinese have reverted to their former militaristic mercantilism, though I doubt Taiwan will be "liberated" until the PRC is no longer afraid of the U.S. If China or the Arabs achieve the type of world domination Britain enjoyed in the 19th century, we could have a new insect takeover. Mao-jacketed blue ants or desert scarabs, anyone?

The Di is Cast (On the Anniversary of Princess Di's Death)

Massive outpourings of grief for public figures we do not know personally, especially on non-events such as anniversaries of their death, usually contain an element of what psychologists call projection: we identify with the person and fill in the blanks with our own yearnings, experiences, and emotions. I believe this has occurred in the case of Princess Di's death and is more than just a matter of having the gory and grotesque circumstances of her demise remind us of our own vulnerability: people who never even expected to care feel as though they had been kicked in the stomach.

Many of us know what it is like to be dismissed by snobs or bullies who think us worthless except as a pop-up doll in somebody else's coloring book and reject us for the silliest of non-reasons, whether in the labor force or the dating circuit. (This applies particularly to the United States, where personnel management is so non-nurturing compared to other countries that it should be called what it really is: shopping!) We can thus readily identify with the princess, who was too human to be accepted by stuffed shirts. Like so many aristocrats, she could easily have vegetated in ostentatious ornamentation and sterile splendor; instead, she tried to make herself useful and help those in need.

As for her sons, many of us feel instinctively that they have been robbed not only of their mother, but also of the most normal person in their environment. There will thus likely be no more counterweight to an institution which raises its sons to be icons, proud of having no emotions except for feelings of superiority. What kind of husband can that possibly produce, not to speak of what kind of monarch?

Ironically, Di is now likely to be cast as the greatest icon of them all: projection is the stuff that saints are made of.

The American Dream Perverted

If I may paraphrase Lorraine Hansberry: What happens to a dream perverted? Does it rot, like a raisin in the slime? I am afraid that the American dream of making oneself a better life is easily perverted because it is inherently ambiguous, encompassing both "equal opportunity for all who work hard" and "I want what I want, screw everyone else." The latter distorts the abuse of the concept of freedom from "liberty limited by responsibility" to an excuse for bad behavior, or worse. Sadly, a democracy can be no better than its Demos, just as "love is no better than the lover," to quote Toni Morrison. American history does not seem to reflect much gentle cooperation or lofty egalitarianism: the mistreatment of blacks, Indians, immigrants, and women was not imposed by some dictator, but by the people themselves. The leaders chosen are thus embodiments of wishful wanting: righteous types to be supported versus predatory types to be emulated, depending on the personality of the wishers. It is thus no surprise that such icons of fantasy are often closely aligned with the world of entertainment: twice in my lifetime has a president been elected who was a fictional character rather than a person, from the professor on Me and the Chimp to the firer of phony employees on a reality show. We have raised silliness to an art form, just as the Slavic peoples have raised suffering to an art form.

Borrowing an idea from William Thackeray: I believe the concept that people's faults are simply a logical extension of their virtues (e.g. a generous person can easily become a spendthrift) also applies to nations. Virtually unlimited economic freedom has perverted the economy into unchecked greed. Thus, the credit principle made it possible for people to buy cars and homes over time, but also encouraged irresponsibility and deficit spending, thus jeopardizing the finance and insurance industries and ballooning the national debt. Additionally, intentionally misnaming a type of debt insurance "credit default swaps" so as to avoid regulation as insurance should be re-outlawed as it was for most of the 20th century; these "financial instruments" are just gambling with other people's money, and taxpayers should not be asked to bail out the blithe destructiveness of betting on whether homeowners can meet their mortgage obligations. This is neither investment nor speculation, but gambling, like an office football pool.

Ever since the 1980's tax cuts on the wealthy, Republican administrations have been hurting the middle classses, which had theretofore been coddled by an admittedly artificial postwar prosperity. The Bush-Cheney administration seemed to have behaved in a manner almost reminiscent of a kleptocracy, manipulating truth into propaganda to manufacture pretexts for invasion, allowing cronies to enronize our Social Security and Medicare money (be sure that they will try to blame the retiring boomers instead), advocating what even the senior Bush called "voodoo economics," fostering oil crises in order to impose Arctic oil-drilling, and forcing people into the stock market so CEO's can skim off even more millions in bonuses for themselves. It presided over unprecedented losses of American employment (in 1975 anyone who outsourced American jobs to a Communist country would have been lynched for high treason), the major beneficiaries being not the Chinese subcontractors (who only get a tiny fraction of the final price, according to James Mann and Alexandra Harney's 2007 The China Fantasty and The China Price respectively), but the wholesalers, retailers, shareholders, and six-figure-bonus CEO's of the distributing companies. Not to mention the People's Liberation Army, the standard joint-venture partner in China, who are making money hand over fist and are not using it to buy flowers. Circa 2006, Bill Moyers' NOW television program indicated that the Asian women who hand-stitch athletic shoes get only 17 cents per shoe and have to pay for the needle and thread themselves, so that that production costs for the shoes, which subsequently sell for $80, are thus probably less than the sales tax of a typical state.

Like the 17th and 18th-century Polish nobility, the new money-boys have sold their own people down the river for personal gain, ignoring the fact that they are financing their own potential enemies. The Chinese government is taking credit for all those outsourced jobs, thereby legitimizing its power and encouraging it to be even more imperialistic than before. As soon as it is no longer afraid of American military power, it will attempt to reassert its dominance over Taiwan and Vietnam, followed by the "liberation" of some of its former Asian satrapies. It all started with the Reagan tax cuts for the super-rich, who had theretofore had no incentive to be super-greedy because they were paying 90% in taxes; now they were able to outsource American jobs, pocket the salaries of the people they threw out of work, and pay much lower taxes on the "income."

Some of the laissez-faire administrations even appear oblivious to their own illogic, as when someone whom their interest-rate cuts have deprived of thousands of dollars of income is expected to be grateful for a $300 tax rebate or stimulus. (Apparently all they remembered from Economics 101 is interest-rate cuts and distributing handouts to the peasantry.) They also dismissed obvious remedies in the past, such as having the Social Security surplus underwrite the national debt and thereby collect better returns instead of paying high interest rates to commercial banks.

President Reagan and the two Bushes seemed to advocate a return to an idealized 'fifties, as though there were something halcyon about the stifling of legitimate conflict by excluding women and minorities from obtaining justice and competing for a share of the postwar pie. As suggested in my "Toward an Anthropology of the Future" and "The Mythfits," the future can instead be expected to become more violent and contentious than the recent past unless some systemic changes are made. These will presumably entail a goodly amount of intelligent planning, which requires holistic vision and coordinated information to avoid having people try to legislate what they do not understand--otherwise it is better not to plan than to pretend to plan. It will also entail changing the attitudes of some people, especially those who tended not to vote until 1980 because they were pacified by prosperity. Anyone who believes we can revert to our former greatness by reverting to our former behavior is confusing cause and effect: from 1946 to 1973, we had the luxury of acting the way we did because we were great, not vice versa.

Die-hard holdouts of the Western-movie myth will need to realize that in an overpopulated high-tech world, inadequate rules almost inexorably lead to chaos and then fascism. (Imagine what would happen to our streets and highways if there were no traffic regulations.) They will also need to be reminded that the average American has considerably more personal freedom than someone living in, say, France, where opening a B&B requires successfully submitting an application and being told what type of food you may serve, and if you want to play music for spare change in the subway, you have to audition for the authorities, who decide whether you are good enough to play in the Métro.

Disorganization and litigiousness are also contributing to the climate of brutality. The U.S. has only 4% of the world's population but 80% of its lawyers, which means that this bloated group cannot survive without artificial conflict-mongering, and the resulting trend toward legal harassment is taking on some unsavory aspects reminiscent of the Inquisition. It is my contention that we must find some way to curb the pointless conflict and excessive litigiousness which have become exacerbated by economic desperation among a people spoiled by three decades of artificial prosperity. Non-confrontational alternatives such as arbitration and divorce mediation should be explored, and punitive damages should be assessed for frivolous lawsuits which terrorize people with non-evidence. (As an example, drivers who run a stop sign at a corner, sue the corner-house homeowners for damages, and submit irrelevant photographs taken three years after the alleged accident.) It would also help if legislation were updated and phrased more clearly so as to modernize parameters and minimize ambiguity (lawyers are paid to differ in their interpretation of something as supposedly straightforward as the law). For instance, if oral sex were legally classified as sex rather than sodomy, tens of millions of dollars could have been saved in the Lewinsky matter. It would also be a good idea to eliminate the brutal 36-hour shifts for hospital residents, which compromise patient safety and whose only conceivable purpose is weeding out those physicians unfit for combat medicine. I also believe that professionalizing the jury system would make sense, as a jury of your peers no longer means a bunch of amateurs in today's professionalized world.

Similarly, politicians should rethink their recent escalation of incendiary language, vicious personal attack, and mindless snarling: the 1946 civil war in Colombia was triggered precisely by inflammatory rhetoric on the part of irresponsible politicians. I also believe that the campaign question "who [sic] would you rather have a glass of beer with?" did the country a disservice--I don't want a drinking buddy or even a hockey mom, I want a brilliant strategist!

To this relatively unbiased observer, Clinton and Obama (whose name means "I will love" in Latin spelled backwards) were more relatively inclusive and kinder to the middle classes. The Republicans seem to be more to blame for the worrisome escalation of partisanship--they acted like "sore winners" when gaining control of Congress in the early 1990's, and even their fellow party-member Alan Greenspan considers them to be fiscally irresponsible. (I never voted for the Republicans, but I respected them. Not any more.) Also disturbing was the Bush-comes-to-shove comment that Clinton and Gore had been unable to get anything done--how could they, with his own party blocking them every step of the way? This strikes me as bad faith, like crippling somebody and then jeering at him because he can't dance. By "getting things done," the reactionaries now seem to mean "steamrolling the opposition," trotting out magic words like "freedom" and "choice" to exonerate administrative failure and promote alternative schools, thus essentially replacing a public trust with market factors--as though the absence of decent public education were somehow liberating. So it figures that the Bush-Cheney administration was a rerun of the Reagan/senior-Bush neo-'fifties years, followed by the Tea Partyists and Trump MAGAts: a skyrocketing national debt and a do-nothing ornamental government which was merely a front for ego and big business. ( Ralph Nader even called Bush Junior a conglomerate masquerading as a person.)

In addition, film, television, and social media should acknowledge their social responsibility, especially because of the increased exposure of children whose parents both work outside the home. In The Achieving Society, David McClelland postulated that children raised by their parents are more realistic and enterprising than children raised by slaves. I contend that television is a slave (interested in amusing rather than teaching the young master) and further wish to point out that anything a child learns before age six or seven--when learning lateralizes from the intuitive to the logical hemisphere of the brain--is ingested into the basic personality. (The quarrel between Plato and Aristotle is thus no quarrel at all, just a matter of the viewer's age.) If you show children violence as entertainment, what can you expect except more Columbines?

Finally, we must re-examine the intent of the Founding Fathers and adapt it to the present to avoid having the Constitution perverted. I submit that the supposed remedy to its outdated elements, namely amendments thereto, has also been perverted by myopic greed. Examples: the First Amendment was intended to protect freedom of speech, not freedom of commerce (the Founding Fathers would have called pornography and strip clubs "trafficking in hussies," not free speech). The Second Amendment was not meant to allow Saturday Night Specials and machine-guns (which no hunter could possibly need unless attacked by two hundred stags in formation), only muskets for militias because there was no standing army; and the Fifth aimed to outlaw torture (how else do you force someone to incriminate himself?)--which had theretofore been a fairly common method of obtaining confessions--not a way to refuse to tell the truth. In terms of voting, a systemic change is necessary in order to bring the electoral system into the computer age. Comedian Jay Leno called the 2000 presidential election debacle "electile dysfunction," and who could forget the January 6 attempted coup by Trump's minions. Ever since learning at the age of 14 that in 1888 Grover Cleveland won the popular votes but lost the election, I have been advocating a constitutional amendment for the direct election of presidents, especially as a precedent already exists for the direct election of senators. Presidential elections in which the candidate with FEWER popular votes wins abundantly demonstrate the irony of having the most modern nation on earth hamstrung by a totally outdated electoral system. Twice in my lifetime have I seen a president elected by fewer popular votes than his rival. A constitutional amendment favoring a direct election of presidents by universal popular vote would be a step in the right direction, as it would modernize the system; besides, as we know, contested outcomes entail an increased risk of political violence, it is only a matter of time.

The electoral college was invented in an age when there were no computers, logistics could handle only two parties, men wore powdered wigs and white stockings, and the roads were so horrible that the electors often needed a month to get to the nation's capital. No representative democracy had ever been attempted on such a scale before; under the circumstances, the Founding Fathers evidently could think of no better way to safeguard the sovereignty of what amounted to thirteen city-states jealous of their sovereignty (like ancient Athens, only bigger). Nowadays, however, direct popular election of presidents would be not only feasible, but desirable; computers can count every ballot instantaneously and replace the present wildly outdated system with the true principle of one person, one vote. In other words, more in line with what the Founding Fathers would have directed if they had been computer-literate efficiency experts.

In my opinion, the American dream has been perverted by selfish greed which can ruin this country without any help whatsoever from Al-Qaeda; it badly needs to be reformulated.

A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

The response to the September 11 attacks has to date been phrased and implemented in terms of a technological challenge. I believe a big-picture approach would be much more effective and should include emotional, religious, historical, diplomatic, and above all social factors. I think there will be more deadly attacks and expect them to be spectacular and symbolic--perhaps even numerological, like the end of the Maya calendar in 2012 or repetitions of dates significant to Muslims, such as 711 and 731.

The feelings first, in the hope that the resulting catharsis can help us think more clearly. (Superpowers have feelings too!) In the aftermath of the attacks, I still feel as if I were in mourning even though I don't think I knew anybody who perished--like a limp match that won't strike because the air is too humid. I hope the spark and the joy come back someday; it's disconcerting to know that you are so hated by people who have never even met you, and horrifying to hear that when the dump trucks unload the WTC debris in Staten Island, human heads come rolling out. My consolation is that it could have been much worse. There would have been a lot more victims if the attack had been at a different time or so many had not been able to get away quickly. Imagine how much good the terrorists could accomplish if they channelled their ingenuity and persistence toward something productive rather than destructive! I find myself almost missing the Soviets--they may have been dangerous and scary, but at least they were not suicidal murderers.

I fear there will be more attacks; these criminals learn from their mistakes and don't give up. Since they came back to finish off the World Trade Center after their first unsuccessful attempt, I expect them to attack the Pentagon again and "do it right," followed by proud and crowded icons (Sears Tower, Disney), hospitals, universities, bridges, and the like, and to produce weapons-grade anthrax and plague. Although we are unlikely to be destroyed completely, we will get a taste of what it felt like to be a North European repeatedly pillaged by the Vikings a millennium ago, or an African whose village was periodically picked off in Muslim and European slave raids between 650 and 1800. I am less concerned with people my age or older, who have more or less already had a life, than I am with the very young, who may have theirs snuffed out before it has a chance to get started. Suggestions: monitor Muslim professionals and businesses, especially if they look like unprofitable fronts, belong to "foundations," or have names symbolic of conquering intent, such as the dates of military triumphs.

Peace does not seem to be an option; President Bush picked a military man to be his first chief diplomat, which I think says it all. By backing Ariel Sharon as unconditionally as he bashed Saddam Hussein, Bush accomplished a miracle no Muslim leader has ever managed, namely uniting the Muslims. It might have been better to enlist the aid of the Iranians (let them work off their frozen assets) or get a Palestinian to persuade bin Laden to call off his fatwa (the resulting Nobel Peace Prize would give him or her enough prestige to convince Israel that those deliberately provocative settlements are counterproductive--we are paying for them twice now, once with our taxes and once with our lives). Suggestions: persuade Israel that its belligerence is breeding super-fanatics the way antibiotics and roach-spray breed super-bugs; cut off foreign aid to Israel and the Muslim countries and use the savings to rebuild; keep out fundamentalists, who de facto want to overthrow the U.S. government because "the Qur'an is our constitution." Find out what foreign students from Muslim countries are studying and figure out how the knowledge in question can be misused for destructive purposes. Watch destructive movies such as "Independence Day" for clues regarding future mischief. Ask the Russians what anti-US shenanigans the KGB was planning during Soviet times.

Those Muslims who feel that the U.S. is a bully and deserved to be attacked have not read their history: compared to every past empire I know of (Assyrian, Roman, Chinese, Mongol), the United States has been ridiculously mild. Ask any West German, Japanese, or Filipino what the American occupation was like, and they will tell you it was a good one. It is true that dominant nations dominate--they do so by nature and by definition. However, if the Americans were such horrible bullies, outsiders would not have dared to attack them: had September 11 been perpetrated upon the Nazis or the Soviets, all of Mecca, including the Kaaba, would have been pulverized by September 12.

Geopolitically, what we need now is someone as international, creative, and diplomatic as Frederick II of Sicily's Hohenstauffen dynasty. Since his parents died when he was a tiny child, he was raised in a succession of households--Byzantine, Arab, maybe also Jewish--and thus learned a variety of languages and cultures at a very early age. He further appears to have learned to think for himself rather than accept authority blindly; for instance, as an adult he wrote a treatise on birds wherein he contradicted Aristotle from empirical observation. The Pope considered him so dangerously independent that he excommunicated him, but lifted the excommunication when Frederick reluctantly agreed to participate in the Crusades. He did this by raising an army of Sicilian Arabs and camping out and chatting with the Muslim commander in Palestine, who was so impressed by Frederick's knowledge of the Arab customs and language that he gave the Christians what they wanted (access to the holy sites) without shedding a drop of blood. When Frederick came back, though, the Pope was so angry he hadn't killed anyone that he made him fair game for attack by other European potentates! (Being the most international person I know, I can certainly identify with Frederick--he sounds like a male me.)

Most Near/Middle Easterners I have come across (including ultra-orthodox Jews and Arab Christians) struck me as rabidly repressive or contemptuously superior even if they were not fanatics. No matter how hard I try, I find it virtually impossible to enjoy their company because they inhibit me--they are so dismissive and domineering as to think they can impose their arbitrary rules in someone else's country. Examples: 14th-century travel writer Ibn Battuta positively oozes busybody judgmentalism and arrogant ignorance of local customs on each page; several men in Iran told my tour group, "go home, us Muslims are better than you" and "you women ought to be in a chador"; an Iranian exchange student actually frothed at the mouth when snarling that American girls who dated other men in addition to him "should be killed"; a Middle Eastern grocer whom I tried to give a flier announcing an upcoming concert of Persian music reacted as though I were a whore trying to seduce a monk; an Egyptian Christian believed that oral sex was a CIA plot to emasculate Arab men; and a Pakistani immigrant expressed the ambition of turning the United States into a Muslim country, apparently unaware that the people who built this nation in its present form came here precisely to get away from people like him. I have the distinct feeling that many Muslims in the United States are behaving more like conquerors than like immigrants eager to assimilate.

Unlike Judaism and unlike Roman Catholicism, Islam has no central authority to decide on issues of faith, dogma, or behavior. Although not a particular fan of the Vatican, I must admit that the Pope brings his influence to bear against at least some atrocities. However, Islam stresses an individual's direct and unfettered relationship to God, which means that it enables a fanatic to deify his own projection because no one can prove he is not doing "God's will." If a particular Muslim believes that anyone who has a white dog should be shot, he can surely find a mullah to support him; if another Muslim believes that it is blasphemy to shout "God is great!" while violating the 32nd Sura and destroying what God created, his opinion is no more and no less valid than the white-dog one. Perhaps people can work toward creating a central moral authority to counteract fanaticism; at least it would be worth a try.

In addition, I believe that the high birth rate and child-rearing practices of many Muslim societies virtually guarantee a steady supply of fresh fanatics, a factor intensified by politics and prosperity. It is a sentimental mistake to believe that the latter necessarily leads to liberalization; as was the case with the New World gold looted by the Spanish empire, prosperity can enable the continuation of a medieval system which would otherwise be wildly outdated and prohibitively expensive. More money means more sons with more free time and better technology; a repressive welfare state like Saudi Arabia means more rage. Muslim fundamentalists preached similar hatred of the French and British a century ago, before the Palestinians ever became an issue; the difference now is oil money and the destructive technology it can buy. Besides, social scientists have found that the most violent groups are those seeking to recapture past power and glory.

Middle Eastern girls marry way too immature and uneducated, and since being a wife and mother is the only way to gain respect in their society, they are likely to have many children and to be self-important, repressive, and abusive to them. A former Palestinian neighbor is probably typical: even through two closed and unattached houses, I often heard her screeching at her tiny kids at the top of her lungs, which must be terrifying to a two-year-old (I do not know whether she beat the children). She was so arrogant and irresponsible that she would back her Mercedes out of her driveway without looking ("Aren't you afraid you'll cause an accident?" "I don't care!") and thought she was entitled to leaf-blow her sidewalk trash onto other people's property. A child raised (or lowered) by such parents is likely to have a lot of their garbage fermenting in his soul; since he cannot attack the source (the psyche will not allow it) or escape into drugs or alcohol (Islamic law prohibits intoxicants), he can easily become addicted to his own self-importance and try to destroy anything he cannot control, or at the very least spoil others' enjoyment; the rage then becomes directed vindictively toward something that represents what the abused child cannot have or be. Having been brought up (or down) in an Eastern European hierarchy of abuse masquerading as a family, I distinctly remember fulminating at the world for not acknowledging that I was the supreme arbiter of all things good and proper, and feeling spoilsport envy of kids whose normal parents gave them freedom and respect. Therapy cured me of this syndrome, but the members of my birth family remain so toxic that I have withdrawn from them entirely. Suggestion: have diplomacy include a study of the effects of such medieval child abuse and awareness of the ticking population time-bomb; solicit input from specialists in the psychology of child abuse.

I also have the distinct feeling that the recent attacks are payback for the Gulf War of a decade ago, which was fought by reservists, i.e. irresponsible young boys rather than professional soldiers. When they hit their targets, they let out gleeful yelps at the screen, as though they were playing a video game instead of killing people. The Arabs were watching and listening, and these people don't forget. I remember wondering at the time how much those war-whoops would be costing us in the future.

Another thing that is costing us: Saudi Arabia is actually a family business masquerading as a country; it does not even have a proper army (possibly in order to prevent a military takeover), so outsiders had to do the fighting for them. This was grist for the mill of fundamentalist extremists, who were incensed by all those infidels on their sacred sand. Since repressive Arab governments often get rid of dissidents by exiling them (exporting their hooliganism like the Vikings used to do), other countries are then stuck with the results of someone else's rage. Suggestions: send only Muslim GI's to Saudi Arabia and persuade the Saudis to jail their dissidents, they can surely afford it.

"The Roots of Rage," a Dateline special which aired on NBC December 7, 2001, shows that the Saudi royals consider the oil to be family property. They buy off their subjects with money but forbid political dissent and many forms of public entertainment, such as movies and alcohol. All that thwarted testosterone of course has to go someplace else, namely to the mosques, where rabidly reactionary Wahhabi clerics are allowed to preach vituperative hatred of the West provided they do not topple the family regime. Something similar has happened in Pakistan, whose authorities encouraged the Taliban in order to create a two-against-one situation with India over Kashmir. ) This means that the most modern nation in the world is thus subject to the deliberately inculcated hatred of medieval welfare trash masquerading as murderous high-tech Savonarolas.

Suggestions: persuade the Saudis to give their subjects circuses as well as bread; deny visa applications from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; perform retinal scans and fingerprint identification upon applicants to make sure they do not enter from other countries; promote energy efficiency and alternative fuels; switch to natural gas for home heating; find other sources for electricity, such as solar and wind power; make theater patrons check their coats to prevent them from blowing up a beltful of explosives; and buy oil elsewhere than the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia. Most importantly, we must enlist the aid of moderate Muslims in flagging the destructive plans of militants; with great respect and diplomacy, a normal Muslim might be persuaded that these fanatics are giving his religion a very bad name, and that it would behoove him to do something about it.

It must be remembered that militant Islam is an expansionist political ideology as well as a religion; why uncritically allow its exponents to enter the country if we went out of our way to exclude the Soviet Communists during the Cold War? A milder form is using demographics and economics (making lots of babies and lots of money) to do what Islam has not been able to accomplish by military means since 711, i.e. conquer a Western nation. In my opinion, something must be done to defuse the population time-bomb of excessive fertility (almost everyone except the Muslims is practicing population control), such as finding some activity for Muslim women more interesting than churning out potential suicide bombers.

Lastly, any large-scale operation abroad should include proper planning and not be based upon any presidential whim or reconstruction contracts. Contrast Iraq with the end of World War II: when the Americans knew they would be victorious against Japan, they organized a committee of social scientists, comparative-literature specialists, and the like to advise them as to how to treat the country they would be occupying. Important outcomes included the recommendation that the emperor not be deposed and resulted in the publication of anthropologist Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

In summary: our response must become more inclusive (no dismissing of input just because it was not generated within a particular agency) and more holistic, incorporating data from anthropology, psychology, history, religion, and the like. In other words: think less like bureaucrats and more like detectives.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part 3: Forecasts (NOT predictions!)

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

Gynetic Engineering (NOT a typo)

The Kom Dynasty

Toward an Anthropology of the Future

Goodbye Future!

Gynetic Engineering

If you are also the kind of person whose idea of a good time is to spend hours in bookshop browsing, thumbing, and thinking, undeterred by sore toes and late hours, then you may be able to empathize. Around 1968, while I was raising my own consciousness and living with the man who was later to become my husband, we wandered through a Marboro together and, as usual, separated: he headed for the mechanical-arts section, whereas I gravitated toward the anthro-socio-political areas which were to fascinate me through college and beyond.

One of the books I leafed through and became engrossed in was a hardcover collection of predictions, dire and otherwise, by someone whose name I unfortunately didn’t bother to remember. Among other assorted goodies, he or she foretold that sometime soon, an underwater volcano would cause Lake Geneva to bubble and froth, and anyone in the water to surface “boiled a livid red.” Shuddering halfheartedly, I made a semi-serious mental note to avoid Lake Geneva in the future—it isn’t my favorite lake anyway—but some of the other prophesies didn’t seem so easily avoidable. One in particular disturbed me so much that I thought its fulfillment would make death preferable to life.

The “prophet” had predicted that by the year 2000, women would lose even the semblance of equality they had been working so hard to achieve, and be degraded to subhuman slaves for the benefit of men. The instrument of such a revolution was to be a demented political leader who hated women (sound familiar?) and who would abolish marriage and make women public property.

Okay, so I don’t believe in occultism as an article of faith, only that it is unscientific to say that such things are not possible, and this particular prediction seemed to be quite eminently possible when the right correlations were abstracted. I was beginning to learn that many men don’t generally like women (they tolerate us because they need us and use us), although others seem to have become better in the meantime; an almost-major in anthropology subsequently taught me that, cross-culturally speaking, whatever men do has higher status than whatever women do because men have higher status. Given such imbalance, I decided that the only significant deterrents to the fulfillment of this prediction were convention and logistics, and that both could be changed.

For instance, two of the conventions presently militating against such degradation are the ideal of romantic love and the system of democratic institutions. But romantic love has long been co-opted by the economy, which knows that it is only good for selling lipstick and engagement rings; and as for our democratic institutions, they are only a few centuries old, and quite demonstrably fragile besides. Furthermore, democracy has historically not been friendly to women: think of the recent inferior status of Swiss females and of the invisible, disenfranchised women of Periclean Athens. The abundance of pornography and media violence further demonstrates that free commerce, not free speech, is at issue, and that Marshall McLuhan was absolutely right when he called photography a brothel without walls.

That leaves logistics, specifically the near-fifty-fifty male-female ratio in today’s world which is largely a product of the randomness of nature, as the significant deterrent to the prophet’s prediction—and this variable, too, can be changed. After all, it has in the meantime become possible to predict or even predetermine the sex of unborn children (by amniocentesis or ultrasound followed by selective abortion, artificial insemination with Y chromosomes, infanticide, or in vitro hatching à la Faust’s Homunculus), and thereupon lead to the conclusion that this could seriously affect the ratio of men to women in generations to come. When I wrote as much in a 1971 anthropology paper which speculated on whether there would be marriage as we know it in the foreseeable future, my thoughts were discounted as “poor,” which confirmed my nagging suspicion that Cassandras usually get the idiot treatment; the reaction to my 1975 precursor to this essay for a CUNY graduate course on women in dystopian literature further required that I explain that “gynetic” was not a typo. But numerous books and articles on genetic engineering and the “man-child fixation” (Boy or Girl?) showed me that the prophet and I may unfortunately be right. However, such articles merely expounded on the biological method for achieving the imbalance, without speculating as to what the social consequences could be. It is important that we contemplate the possibilities with a view to formulating a practical philosophy, for two reasons: (a) the potentialities are staggeringly alarming, and (b) too many feminist ideas are unfortunately prone to self-cancellation. (For instance: more working wives may depress female wages even further; supporting prostitutes as “sisters” can lower us all to being viewed as such.)

First, let us discount the breathless Cosmopolitan assumption that a dearth of women and a preponderance of men would be an advantage to women because there would be more of those darling men to go around. It must be remembered that being considered rare and desirable merchandise is not tantamount to dignity; that men do not need to “have” a woman all to themselves; and that cultures in which there are more men than women (contemporary Tokyo, for instance, or the Yanomamo of the Orinoco valley, or imperial China, or the gold-rush shantytowns) do not necessarily consider women equal to men. As a matter of fact, Margaret Mead pointed out in an anthropology lecture series at the American Museum of Natural History around 1976 that polyandry does not mean matriarchy: rather than one wife’s lording it over four husbands, it means four husbands’ sharing of one captive wife.

Secondly, let us not delude ourselves that such a thing is not possible. Within a generation or two, a 5% annual surplus of male children can bring about a sizable imbalance, one which our economy would be characteristically quick and flexible to exploit. The unemployment rate would dwindle to near-nothing, as there would be no women in the work force; former “women’s work” such as cooking, washing, and sewing would be taken over by men and machines (we must remember that many of the jobs presently extant in our country are the result of the mechanization of former housework—any man who complains that women are taking away his job deserves to know that he’s taken away ours, from making baby foods to selling clothes to boarding guests); the cosmetics companies could easily convert to makeup for men; the merchants of sex would only have to compete with each other, rather than with normal women as well; and, with the industrialization of women’s work making wives useless, there would be no reason for men to marry any more. Even today, with the help of laundries, coffee shops, and massage parlors, a man doesn’t actually need a wife; formerly, he had no way of getting that kind of service unless he married it, nor of achieving the fatherhood status that our culture considered important until very recently.

Thirdly, let us see what such an imbalance would wreak upon sex and reproduction. While young, the female minority could easily be kept in public harems, known as brothels or massage parlors in more old-fashioned days. (Remember that this is not a pornographic fantasy, but a terrifyingly real possibility.) When older, these same women would become “breeders,” inseminated artificially and made to bear pre-programmed offspring annually until their eggs became tired, at which point they could easily be eliminated. (Remember that a predominantly male, predominantly disgruntled electorate would not be terribly concerned about the rights of subhumans.) Both stages are the local answer to a dearth of females: what would any right-thinking capitalist do if all shoes were made by hand and there weren’t enough shoes to go around? (After all, even our cattle are separated into dairy and meat cows.)

Furthermore, if a culture is warlike, it would actually welcome a high proportion of relatively belligerent young males for purposes of military conquest; their needs could be serviced by a relatively small number of women. Think of the Korean “comfort girls,” of the ISIS fanatics, or of contemporary China, whose one-child policy has over the past few decades produced a sex-ratio surplus of thirty million men—that’s the population of Canada! The most frightening example of such systemic violence is probably that of the Vikings a thousand years ago, wherein primogeniture (only the eldest son can inherit so as to prevent parcellization of already marginal cropland) and polygyny (the type of polygamy in which a man marries multiple women) proved such an explosive combination. Say a typical husband would have four wives who produced a total of 16 children, half of whom were boys. That would leave seven sons with no land, no jobs, no prospects, and no women. Such disgruntled have-nots were virtually guaranteed to form mobs of ruthless marauders which terrorized much of Europe for centuries.

Fourthly, let us contemplate that shutting our eyes to such possibilities is not the answer. Of course, I hope my prediction is wrong (although it does not seem so thus far), but discounting me as an alarmist will do no good. Except that I, for one, do not know what to do. After much soul-searching and agonizing, I long ago decided not to have children—why subject myself to great expense in terms of time, money, and anguish just to raise consumers and cannon fodder for someone else’s benefit in an unjust world? This is a shame because it is a copout, because I like children and would probably have made a good mother, and because I would have been proud to raise the kind of person I would like to see more of. Perhaps serious discussion on the part of dedicated theorists could come up with another way out, which is why I formulated this spectral possibility almost half a century ago in the hope that some sensible futurist could refute my horrible theory. However, please do not discount it as “too far-fetched.” Eighty years ago, what could have seemed more farfetched than a lunatic legally gassing millions of people simply because he didn’t like the shape of their noses?

The Kom Dynasty

History and Religion

In my opinion, Chinese history and religion are largely conditioned by the fact that China was (and still is) an empire whose unity is more artificial than most people realize, since the writing system (see Language & Writing) and the dynastic-cycle method of recording history obscure a lot of underlying diversity. The result is the macropathy typical of empires--centralization without coordination--which, coupled with the cooperation required for irrigated rice farming and the resulting huge population, would seem to make absolutism almost a foregone conclusion; China could never afford to be as tolerant as a less populous nation where there is room enough for everybody and loners can make a living unassisted.

One could also predict that managing such an empire would require an army of bureaucrats, which was (and is) of course the case. During ancient times, any man could theoretically become a scholar, pass the imperial examinations, and enter the civil service, although in practice scholars usually came from wealthy leisured families rather than poor farm groups. Some people have even commented that the Cultural Revolution was in fact waged over who would control the bureaucracy, which reminds me of Winston Churchill's famous quip that the American Civil War was fought to determine whether United States should be a singular or a plural noun.

Chinese historiographers classify almost exclusively by dynasties, treating them like self-contained, unchanging wholes; every new dynasty further has the tendency to rewrite history. The first member of a dynasty, usually a military man who consolidates his predecessors' chaos, is almost deified; the last is always described in the vilest of terms as a total degenerate. (He is the only one to whom the "Teflon factor" does not apply; all the other emperors' atrocities are usually pinned onto the "unofficial bureaucracy" of wives and eunuchs.) Oversimplifying grossly, dynasties last about two centuries apiece; they start out centralized and rich, largely because the clean broom sweeps out aristocratic privileges and broadens the tax base, and then gradually decompose as aristocrats regain their hold and buy up peasant land, thereby cutting off funds and forced labor from the central government. The Chinese view of history as a cycle of dynasties contingent upon the rulers' personal morality is very different from our belief that it is a linear march of ideas and progress.

A dynasty was only viewed as legitimate as long as it possessed the "mandate of heaven," and the signs of having lost the mandate included peasant rebellions and natural disasters. Since China's rivers tend to flood periodically because they are so low-gradient that silt buildups cause them to change course, one can easily imagine that floods and famine go hand in hand, causing peasant revolts and leading to a new dynasty. When an earthquake wrought massive destruction in the Beijing area around 1976, there was serious worry that the Communist government (the Kom Dynasty?!) had lost the mandate of heaven.

The single most creative era of Chinese thought preceded unification (which occurred around 221 BC) and featured a wealth of philosophy and experimentation. Confucius and his disciples formulated an idealized hierarchy of human behavior which was expected to regulate and stabilize society; in what was essentially "back-to-basics" jeremiads, he indulged in scholarly fulminations to the effect that everything would be fine if kings acted like kings, sons like sons, and so forth. (This doctrine, called the rectification of names, typifies what I perceive to be a Chinese attitude: it is the responsibility of the territory to be congruent with the map.) His followers sometimes arrived at diametrically opposed positions, as in interpreting his statement that all men are alike when they start out: Hsün-Tzu thought man intrinsically evil, Mencius intrinsically good. Although the Communists revile Confucianism because they associate it with pre-revolutionary "bourgeois feudalism," they have actually swallowed most of its precepts intact, especially the emphasis on hierarchy and unquestioning obedience.

Taoism (pronounced Dow-ism), mystical and romantic, the other major current in Chinese philosophy, is characterized by personal freedom and a striving for communion with nature, which sometimes degenerated into a search for the herb of immortality even while it gave Chinese cuisine all that variety born of experimentation. Although officially reviled by imperial Confucianists who saw it as a threat to state control, Taoism has nevertheless become a potent force in Chinese philosophy. It is typical of its synthesis with the yin-yang theory that "hot" and "cold" foods must be balanced in a dish, such as exemplified by chicken with gingko nuts: chicken is "hot" because the rooster is the first animal to greet the rising sun, whereas gingko nuts are "cold" because the gingko flowers open at night. To me, that sounds as though one were cooking poetry.

These two philosophies are not mutually exclusive; it was possible for a Confucianist government official to dabble in Taoist poetry and nature-mysticism as soon as he got home. Other currents of thought and belief included the 100 Schools, Legalism, Naturalism, Dialecticism, etc., with ancestor worship permeating whatever synthesis resulted at various points in history. In ancient China's family-oriented society, kinship was important because it established reciprocal obligations; kin could do things for you, which explains what most Westerners would consider an exaggerated emphasis on filial piety. Dead ancestors are also in a position to intercede with the gods and to get things done for their living descendants.

The Chinese do not believe in reincarnation nor an afterlife in the Buddhist or Christian meanings; their popular religion is in fact a practical synthesis, very much geared to the here and now and to social control. Buddhism is used for spiritual hygiene, ancestor worship to gain favor with the gods, Taoism to ensure a long and healthy life, Confucianism to regulate the mechanics of society (which can be quite formidable in a country as populous as China), and the yin-yang school to explain the ceaselessly flowing duality of opposites. The whole mix is often characterized by a somewhat perplexing emphasis on appearances and a tendency to ignore or trick inconvenient agents. A good example is the institution of the stove-god (photo available), whose existence the government denies because of official atheism; stove-gods and ancestral burial-mounds can, however, still be found in abundance in the countryside. A stove-god is a wood-block print with a calendar; he observes the family's goings-on from his perch atop a hearth. After a year, he is replaced and burned so he can fly to heaven and tell the Jade Emperor about the family's behavior. Before burning him, however, the family usually smears honey on his lips to prevent him from delivering a bad report!

Everything changes when it comes to China--in my opinion, because it is digested in Confucian gastric juices. Buddhism is a perfect example. The Indians love to speculate, whereas the Chinese love to classify. India needed a religion to explain human inequality and came up with the concept of reincarnation; China was less interested in explanation than in social control. In Indian Buddhism, a boddhisattva is someone who has achieved enlightenment and is entitled to Nirvana, but who chooses instead to continue the painful treadmill of rebirths in order to help his fellow man; one of the most famous of these is Avalokitesvara. The Chinese synthesis, however, transformed him into a woman, namely Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy (photo); the compassionate teacher has become a deity to whom people pray for favors as though (s)he were a Catholic saint. Or an ancestor.

In my opinion, Communism is undergoing the same digestive transformation as China's previous imported religions suffered upon absorption into the Confucian synthesis. (A good example would be Mao's glorification of spontaneity and the peasants, contrasted with Lenin's icy disdain for both.) Wild policy fluctuations are nothing new in a country in which emperors have varied from the hands-on toughness of Wu Ti (140-87 BC) to pliant weaklings to outright infants manipulated by regents or dowager empresses. One could even speculate that the Chinese value harmony and order so highly simply because their violent history has had so little of both, or that the main result of Tian An-Men Square will be to accentuate the suspicion with which Chinese peasants have always viewed city-dwellers. The all-important imperial bureaucracy is still alive and well, its style and substance virtually unchanged; local officials' powers to interpret imperial decisions remain undiminished. Say some absolute ruler (whether emperor or committee) decrees that no family may have more than one child; the local bureaucrats' interpretations can nevertheless be diametrically opposed, with the proverbial blind eye in one province juxtaposed against atrocities such as third-trimester abortions just a few miles away. There have also been cultural revolutions before: the massacre of intellectuals and burning of books in 221 BC; Wang Mang's usurpation from 9-23 AD; the mass killing of eunuchs in 189 AD; Empress Wu's intrigues and reign of whim and terror; An Lu-Shan's 755 rebellion; the persecutions of Buddhists and Taoists during the 9th century (let us not forget that monasteries eroded the government's tax base!); Wang An-Shih's reforms circa 1075 and the subsequent anti-reform backlash; the late Sung persecution of Chu Hsi's neo-Confucianists; the eunuch Wei Chung-hsien's brutal purges 1624 et seq.; the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1800's; the Boxer Rebellion around 1900; and the 1911 revolution. In fact, I consider the turbulent 20th century to be merely a pimple upon China's violent history, consistent with tradition rather than a departure therefrom. Plus ça change....

China Today and Tomorrow, from "The Kom Dynasty"

Having greatly enjoyed my few semesters of Chinese language and culture as an undergraduate, I was very much interested in learning how different modern China is from its ancient predecessor. Several trips to China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macao, plus substantial independent research (see bibliography), led me to believe that the difference is no greater than between one dynasty and its successor; my impression was that whatever changes have been made reinforce tradition rather than breaking with it.

For instance, modern China claims to be scientific, but does not seem to realize that any ideology is unscientific by nature, since it imposes a manifesto to be obeyed by reality instead of hypothesizing theories to understand reality (and deliberately trying to disprove them). It subsumes everything into a linear historical progression from slavery to feudalism to capitalism ("bourgeoisism") to socialism, distorting the evidence if need be to conform to the design. This even extends to something as unpolitical as archeology: at the 8000-year-old neolithic Ban Po site discovered in 1953, the mere fact that two female skeletons were buried together is interpreted to mean that it was a matriarchal society, an inference no self-respecting Western archeologist would make on such flimsy data. The Chinese apparently have no qualms about suppressing inconvenient evidence; for instance, a 1998 Nova program about the mummies of the Taklimakan Desert showed that a specimen had been beheaded so as to conceal the fact that she was an Indo-European.

Further, I believe that Communism is undergoing a process of synthesis, becoming digested into Confucianism like prior imported religions such as Buddhism. (I guess the resulting amalgam could be called Comfucianism.) Hierarchy and obedience have most definitely not been eliminated, so I believe that China is still a feudal society no matter what they call it. Even in a relationship of supposed equality such as friendship, a senior-junior hierarchy tends to establish itself, often including bullying and/or manipulation. My readings and personal observation lead me to believe that China intends to become the "global top-dog friend" so that it can exercise worldwide the same punitive control it used recently on Disney for making "Seven Years in Tibet." (American tycoons who export manufacturing jobs to China so as to make even bigger profits are selling their own grandchildren--and their country as a whole--down the river; just a few decades ago they would have been lynched for high treason. When the Polish nobility acted thus in the 17th and 18th centuries, the result was the total dismemberment of the Polish nation.) Throughout history, China has behaved like a mercantilistic super-corporation whose CEO's are subject to no accountability or controls, except for periodic slave rebellions when conditions become intolerable.

China appears to remain a conservative, puritanical, and extremely imperialistic country ruled by often capricious bureaucrats whose ambition of "serving the state" is actually code for "bullying people." Throughout history, members of the military and the bureaucracy had virtual carte blanche and could be abusive with impunity as long as their sadistic self-importance was not incongruent with the sadistic self-importance of the State.

So unquestioning obedience is still considered obligatory, as evidenced by the following experience I had in Beijing. A tall young immigration official dourly snapped at us to line up in the sequence of our group visa numbers, which of course none of us knew. I joked to our tour leader that we had been ordered to present ourselves numerically. The official overheard me; realizing that he was being pompous, he later engaged me in conversation--which went surprisingly well, given the rudimentary nature of my Chinese and his English. It turned out he had been a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, which meant that he was deprived of an education. When I asked him what that decade had been like, he said it was a lot of fun--"we travelled around the country for free and borrowed money for our food." Did they pay it back? No. Did he think the Cultural Revolution was a good thing? No. Would he do the same thing again? Yes, because you must always obey your leader even if you have your doubts or know he is wrong, because otherwise you will be killed. I told him that the French call the Chinese "blue ants" and asked if that assessment was correct; he thought about it a while and said it was.

The centrifugal tendency of empires to decompose into intrigue and factions and to fragment into natural ethnic groupings continues apace, although somewhat attenuated by more high-tech surveillance. (Nowadays even the comforting proverb "The mountain is high, and the emperor is far away" has been rendered obsolete by technology.) The gobbled-up "minorities" (such as Mongols, Uighurs, and Tibetans) are losing their culture at an alarming rate, and their Chinese overlords are more meddlesome and ethnocentric than I would have thought possible. (Even foreign conqueror-dynasties such as the Yüan and the Ch'ing have, after all, lost their identity to the Chinese.) The PRC also tends to ignore or deny any evidence in its disfavor, acting genuinely surprised that, say, the Tibetans would revolt after the Chinese had done so much for them. ("We even let them practice their religion and twirl their prayer-wheels.") For instance, one of China's favorite Western movies is "The Sound of Music," but no Chinese I met had grasped the parallel between Nazi Germany and the People's Republic of China.

They appear to believe blindly whatever their leaders tell them, which is of course often distorted or untrue. Although they were extremely knowledgeable about foreigners' problems, such as teenage suicide and street crime, I was only able to find a single person who realized that the Cultural Revolution was a crime, and a state-sponsored one at that. Let me stress, however, that the Chinese I spoke to were very nice personally; I am referring here only to the ideology they have swallowed.

I also found the Chinese--even overseas Chinese--to be extremely imperialistic. For instance, they keep repeating that Tibet is part of China and has been for 300 years. The truth is that the Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty, which the PRC vilifies so much and which was not even Chinese, had a protectorate relationship with Tibet, dating from 1720, similar to the "patron and priest" relationship which Tibet had enjoyed with the Mongols when the latter conquered China. After 1790, the Manchus could not even protect Tibet from foreign invasion. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say the Chinese would like to claim any piece of earth where any Chinese has ever been, which is why I would not be the least surprised to see them invade any country with which they have ever had a tribute relationship of any kind, including Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Java, Ceylon, Nepal, and Laos. (They of course conveniently forget that the Chinese have paid tribute to and been subdued by others.)

Furthermore, the Teflon factor seems to predate the invention of Teflon by several millennia: with the exception of the last member of any dynasty, every emperor is exonerated for his errors, which are instead pinned onto someone else. Mao is considered a great man, "you can see that from his mistakes," the fault being shifted onto his widow and Lin Piao. Similarly, Wang An-shih and assorted reformers were pilloried instead of emperor Shen Tsung, whose ideas they were merely putting into practice; also, emperor Kao Tsung shifted the blame for his failures onto chief councillor Chin Gwei. Chou Yang, considered an antirevisionist champion in 1963, was later purged as a revisionist! I consider Maoism to be more Chinese than Communist, especially in its glorification of trade and agriculture; for instance, Mao criticized Soviet-style tax collecting as "draining the pond to catch the fish" and fomented "bourgeois" trade, often disobeying the Central Committee to do so.

Appearances seem to be as important as ever. For instance, tourists must have visible locks on their luggage. Never mind if they're the flimsy cheap variety that a child could open in ten seconds with a hairpin; the important thing is to have a lock. Similarly, the questionnaires tourists are asked to fill out at the end of the trip to evaluate the guides and services are opened and read by the guides. This is highly reminiscent of the imperial position of "censor," whose duty it was to inform the emperor if he was wrong. As that normally meant forfeiting his life, the censor usually said nothing--his existence was ornamental, to safeguard appearances.

Diplomacy apparently also continues to be ornamental, or at least subordinate, in the sense that its function is manufacturing justifications for the military. Talking diplomacy with a Chinese diplomat is equivalent to discussing a conglomerate's mergers-and-acquisitions policy with its public-relations manager.

The legal system also seems to continue tradition: as before, the main function of the law is to define a crime (with punishment being preordained and automatic) and to safeguard society (raping a woman is punished no more severely than stealing from a factory because the rape is a crime against a mere individual). An update, as reported by Todd Crowell and David Hsieh in the October 18, 1996 issue of AsiaWeek: the newly issued Chinese Citizens' Handbook now allows citizens to sue companies, with the law specifying the amount of damages in advance. However, I believe this represents a continuation of rather than a break with legal tradition, as it preordains the multiple to be automatically applied (shades of defining the crime) and concentrates largely upon the misdeeds of private, not governmental, companies.

In keeping with the Mandate of Heaven theory, wherein every new dynasty rewrites history and appropriates its predecessors' accomplishments, the Kom Dynasty is silently taking credit for whatever the Nationalists did well while simultaneously vilifying them. Pursuant to the earthquakes around Beijing circa 1976, there was considerable worry that the Communists had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Oversimplifying grossly, the "mandate of heaven" is only retained as long as the peasants are kept happy enough to be productive. I expect a major problem in this regard because the PRC is now sacrificing its peasants to industry and trade, much as Great Britain did when repealing the Corn Laws in 1846.

China consciously decided millennia ago that society is paramount in importance, the individual insignificant; orthodoxy and conformity are valued in and of themselves. This does not appear to have changed, nor do I expect it to do so in the future, given the societal control required by a huge population and endeavors which must needs be cooperative, such as irrigation. I even expect modern inventions such as computers to reinforce this trend rather than abrogating it. The Chinese see no gray area between autocracy and anarchy; they value order, no matter how pathological, over disorder, no matter how creative. Every dynasty to date has gained power by military violence, and so far each one has been replaced because nobody dared correct the powerful, which invites abuse, corruption, and horrendous mistakes because power does not equal wisdom and nobody is smarter than everybody. (For millennia, China has only questioned the legitimacy of any dynasty's wielding of absolute power, never the absolute power per se. As democracy means limits on power, the innocent demands of the students at Tian An-Men Square were revolutionary and therefore dangerous, which explains the viciousness of the government's reaction.) Also, we must remember that the Chinese languages force hierarchical thinking upon their speakers. For instance, there is no word for "brother" or "sister" --you must specify whether the sibling in question is older, younger, or a twin. The PRC's professed liberalism has now been shown to be style rather than substance, wanting to have your cake and eat it too, in the manner of a man who orders his mousy wife to join Women's Liberation to make her a less boring conversationalist at parties and is then flabbergasted to have her question his judgment in public. Deng also seemed to be confusing cause and effect when stating that prosperity comes before freedom; after all, it is freedom which causes prosperity, not vice versa.

What about the future? I must confess to one overriding apprehension. To wit: the one-child policy, which I am afraid will lead to a disproportionate number of men vis-à-vis women in later decades. Due to female infanticide, neglect and abuse of female children, and suicide among daughters-in-law, there have always been more men than women in China, but in the past the problem was solved by economics: poor men either did not marry or had to settle for women too homely or dimwitted to find a better husband. Now that amniocentesis, ultrasound, and selective abortion are so common and everyone is supposedly equal, however, I expect a preponderance of males will make for ugly social problems and for a dangerous army of malcontents eager to engage in warfare for women and land. Let us remember that the Vikings were such a threat to Europe a thousand years ago specifically because there was a very high percentage of unmarried have-nots among its male population.

I fear this will contribute to wide-ranging upheaval in the near future due to China's historically innate militaristic mercantilism and cultural imperialism. (Lest we forget: Kuan Ti, the Chinese god of war, is also the god of commerce and literature.) I hope I am wrong, but I think the mainland is poised for invasion within the next generation, by which time the one-child policy will have produced a surplus of disgruntled men who will never be able to marry. Since the PRC has gotten Hong Kong back, there is no reason to be nice any more; I believe Beijing's bullying Seoul into severing official ties with Taipei to be a relatively benign announcement of its intentions. Besides, the PRC government is making money hand over fist with all its new business ventures, money which can safely be assumed is not being used to buy flowers. (By purchasing Chinese footwear, we will in effect be kicking ourselves in the behind with our own shoes within a generation.) However, I think China will first take advantage of the demoralized, bankrupt disintegration of the Russian army in the wake of the Soviet collapse and invade Russia's client state of Mongolia.

In a typical instance of China's convoluted imperialist logic, it claims that Mongolia is part of it because the Mongols once ruled China as the Yüan Dynasty! The Chinese word for "China," "junggwo," literally means "central kingdom/ middle country," which used to mean "the country surrounded by barbarians," but since China has swallowed the "barbarians" and renamed them "minorities," the concept is veering perilously close to "the navel of the world." (The Chinese languages are often so telegraphic as to be ambiguous, and whoever is in power can be counted on to impose whatever interpretation is most favorable to him.) Let me quote from p. 111 of Founders of Living Religions (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1974) by Herbert Stroup of Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research: "The Chinese... believed that they inhabited the earthly center of the universe and that as one went out from the middle kingdom, especially from the emperor's palace and its altars, one met with increasingly inferior peoples." China has in fact never countenanced the possibility of the diplomatic equality of any other nation. Based on my studies and travels, I believe the Chinese have contempt for foreign people, and they are scarcely less beastly to their own, whom they treat like subjects or slaves rather than citizens.

Anyone who insists on harboring illusions as to PRC intentions would be well advised to observe how China behaves when it has the upper hand--which it has had throughout East Asia for most of its centuries of history. During the Ming Dynasty, for instance, the Koreans could not even invest a Crown Prince without the Chinese emperor's approval, and Vietnam was an outright colony ("the pacified South") for centuries. More recently, PRC bureaucrats who are not even Buddhists think they are entitled to make Tibetan religious decisions. According to the May 6, 1997 New York Times (p. A7), Tibetan Buddhist monk Chadrel Rinpoche was jailed for "splittism" (= separatism) because he told the Dalai Lama which little boy he considered to be the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. Also, the PRC has restructured the holy center of Lhasa as a Buddhist theme park surrounded by a military cordon sanitaire and even appears to have installed listening devices in sites such as the Potala in order to monitor what outsiders are saying. Ismail Kadare's The Concert, a fictionalized account of how the PRC effected spitefully punitive destruction when pulling out of Albania, seems to indicate that China treats Westerners no differently if it has the chance, and the PRC's behavior in the wake of the spy-plane incident in the spring of 2001 appears consistent with this supposition.

Another indication that the Kom Dynasty is continuing tradition rather than breaking with it is the unchanged position of bureaucrats, formerly also known as mandarins or scholars. This army of officials is still in place, since there is really no other way for centralized rule over an empire made up of such disparate pieces. In imperial China, in theory any man could become a scholar, pass the examinations, and receive an appointment as a government official, although in practice the literati tended to come from wealthy leisured families rather than poor farm groups. Terms such as "literature" and "scholar" are actually misnomers, as the studies were clearly meant to produce unquestioning Confucian company-men rather than independent thinkers. Bureaucrats have always been much more interested in giving orders than in humbly investigating how things work, so the literature in question was not scientific treatises (beneath a mandarin's dignity) nor drama and novels (inferior popular entertainment), but platitudinous poems, historical analects, and conventional commentaries, many of them staggeringly obtuse. Anthropologists say that the worse the hazing rituals, the greater the in-group loyalty, so it stands to reason that those passing the grueling examinations tended to be, or at least become, unthinkingly conservative.

In that regard, it is interesting to compare literary censorship by bureaucrats in China and in the defunct Communist empire in Europe. The former has existed for over two thousand years, during which people have been killed because some imperial functionary fancied he saw a derogatory pun in something they wrote; Zhang Yimou is actually lucky that only his films are banned in China. The latter did not last long enough to establish a tradition, besides which it was managed by people who often missed or let slide regime-criticisms couched in the most obvious of allegories (such as Loves of a Blonde), probably because they were too ignorant of literature and/or too lax in their ideology to catch the allusions.

I am afraid that now that the PRC government has made all that money on joint ventures and gotten Hong Kong back, the Chinese will have no more reason to be nice and will revert to their traditional military imperialism, wherein the first step is always reconquering lost territories. From my studies of history, the times China was poor and weak (such as the 19th century) were the only ones in which her neighbors have ever been spared that empire's predatory attentions; at virtually all other times, Chinese power can be compared to what the medieval Church would have had in Europe if its economic, cultural, and political control had been total.

As early as the 6th century BC, Sun-Tzu, in his Art of War, gave ample evidence of the predatory determination that has characterized the Chinese military for millennia: espy an opening, insinuate yourself like an innocent young girl, then wreak havoc like an uncatchable rabbit. (This gave rise to the Chinese idiom: dung jwo to tu, "maneuver like a loosed rabbit.") Unfortunately, I think it is only a matter of time (and time means nothing to these people) before a rich and powerful China precipitates not only a geopolitical crisis, but an ecological disaster as well. As reported in the September 1997 issue of National Geographic ("China's Three Gorges: Before the Flood" by Arthur Zich), journalist Dai Qing received 10 months' imprisonment for criticizing the Three Gorges Dam project; I thus think it reasonable to assume that the PRC government is only willing to listen to those scientists who agree with the mandarin bureaucrats. Significantly, the word "mandarin" comes from the Portuguese "he who gives orders," and with the exception of the Sung, virtually every dynasty has considered science and technology too prosaic for study by "scholars" (i.e. present and future bureaucrats). As I reported in the October-December 1981 issue of the International Law Review ("The Influence of Geology upon the Chinese Mandate of Heaven Theory"), the fact that China's rivers are very low-gradient and carry a lot of sediment from the super-fine loess soil makes them change course periodically, causing widespread floods and famine; ecologically thoughtless human activity (e.g. deforestation of the Tibetan plateau) exacerbates this tendency. I believe undertaking humble dredging efforts to correct that problem would make much more sense than the ambitious Three Gorges water-control-cum-electrical-energy project, which will deprive downstream farmers of rich new soil and could cause untold multiples of horror if the dams or their machinery should become damaged or jammed with sediment, drowning hundreds of millions of people downstream in a lake of stinking sludge half the length of California. If this happens, the PRC will probably be ousted as having lost the mandate of heaven due to "excessive modernization," although the real reason, ironically enough, will be the excessive feudalism of trying to boss Nature around. (The 2008 "quake lakes" intensified my apprehensions.)

Based on China's history, I worry about what will happen if the PRC discovers oil in the Taklimakan Desert, acquires the Spratly islands, or forges a military alliance with fanatical regimes or groups, especially if, say, relatively innocent nationalistic or nuclear noises from Israel or India provide a pretext for the last scenario. Anthropologists believe that the most violent groups tend to be those trying to recuperate their former power, and the Chinese would obviously relish replaying their past total hegemony, with results I consider totally predictable. We must also remember that prosperity can have socially conservative results simply because outdated behavior becomes affordable and a larger proportion of the population gains access to traditional luxuries, becoming pacified by pleasure. Examples: riches from gold and oil made it possible for essentially medieval systems like the Spanish empire and Islamic fundamentalism to survive despite being historical anomalies, and the artificial prosperity of the U.S. after World War II and of China during the Sung Dynasty worsened the position of women because men could afford to dismiss their wives' economic contributions.

Of course, I hope I am wrong, and that the shopgirls who asked me to teach them how to dance are a better barometer of future trends. (We all had an absolute ball, by the way, as did the Western customers who wandered in to buy cloisonné artwork and paper cutouts and appeared pleasantly surprised to see this impromptu party.) The one-child policy may actually undermine militarism by raising a more stable future generation (or at least a more pampered one). However, I remember the Tian An-Men Square massacre, I think about my blue ant the Red Guard immigration official--and I shudder.

Language and Writing in China, from "The Kom Dynasty"

First published in Language International, no. 2.5, 1990.

Most people are aware that the Chinese speak tonal languages; for example, "mai" means either "buy" or "sell" depending on which tone is used. (Put them together, add the "make" prefix, and you have "business.") Most also realize that they write in so-called characters (ideographic symbols) rather than an alphabetic script; thus, literacy in Chinese requires a prodigious amount of memorization.

In my opinion, China could not possibly be so united if it had a phonetic rather than an ideographic writing system. The various Chinese "dialects" are in fact different languages, often mutually unintelligible; the Mandarin word for "eat" is "chrfan," the Fujienese "tsebwo," the Cantonese "hek (sikh)" (I left out the tones to avoid confusion). The written character, however, is the same throughout, since it transmits not the sound, but the idea--somewhat like having a Frenchman and an American recognize the Arabic number "5" even though they pronounce it "sank" and "five" respectively. It has also long been possible for the Chinese to "communicate by brush" (i.e. in writing) with other cultures that adopted similar writing systems.

Possibly because they were derived from scapulimancy (divination based on oracle-bone crack-marks), the characters inspire almost superstitious awe among the Chinese. The Kun Iam temple in Macao, for instance, contains a tree which three generations of monks trained into the shape of the character for "long life," and the Chinese believe that touching this tree brings longevity. (Similarly, they fear the number four because it sounds like the word for death.) This reverence can be anything but funny: in Chinese history, people have been killed because some imperial functionary fancied he saw a derogatory pun in something they wrote, and one of the obstacles to female emancipation is the fact that the character for "woman" is composed of the radicals "female" and "whiskbroom."

Radicals are the building-blocks of the Chinese character, and one must use the correct sequence of brushstrokes in writing because Chinese dictionaries classify radicals by that method. (Imagine being unable to find the word "theater" in an English dictionary simply because you perversely insist on crossing the "t" before performing the orthodox downward stroke.)* Radical combinations can often be quite poetic: the character for "good" is a combination of the radicals for "woman" and "child." In case you're wondering: yes, it is theoretically possible to learn to read Chinese without knowing how to speak it.

Chinese languages are also so terse as to be telegraphic, which creates an awful lot of ambiguity. The Mandarin word for China, "junggwo," literally means central kingdom/middle land; it was originally meant to designate "the country surrounded by barbarians" but now seems to be veering perilously close to "the navel of the world," possibly because China has since in fact swallowed the "barbarians," whether they be Mongols or Tibetans. (As usual, whoever is in power determines how an ambiguity is to be interpreted.) China has in fact never countenanced the possibility of the diplomatic equality of any other nation.

China's ethnocentrism is exemplified in its treatment of foreign linguistic material: substituting synonyms to gut alien words like capitalism of their etymology (caput= the first thing, i.e. investment), inserting propaganda content in its place (bourgeois-ism, i.e. an insult), and using the stuffed shell as though it were the original. (Marx did not write in Chinese; the German word "Bürger," derived from Burg = fortress, has the primary meaning of the enfranchised citizen of a town.) Private business is not capitalism, but free enterprise (!); never mind that Communism is simply state capitalism. When the Chinese say "self-criticism," they don't mean our brand of soul-searching, but rather the kind of self-flagellation indulged in by heretics about to be burned at the stake; they also disdain the English word "separatism" in favor of their own invention, "splittism."

Chinese and English classify according to different systems. Chinese has trouble distinguishing between liberalism and license, or will and purpose, and the word for yes, "shr," represents not a universal abstraction, but a concrete reference to what precedes it ("right" would be a better translation). If you ask a Chinese "don't you drink?" and he answers "yes," he means "yes, you are correct, I don't drink." I interpret these differences to mean that Chinese obedience is to concrete power rather than any abstract principle or ideal.

Translations into English are done by Chinese, contrary to the professional guideline according to which translators should work into, not from, their mother tongue. Those published in book form or in the "China Reconstructs" propaganda brochures are of good quality, being cleaned up by "polishers" whose native tongue is English, but unpolished versions often verge on the ludicrous, a prime example being the visually beautiful book distributed free to passengers on the Hong Kong-bound train. "Don't twist your ankle" becomes "no twisting of ankles," "study to become what you wish to be" turns into "study to be what you wish to seem," and so forth. Even when correct, words, are often run together and/or hyphenated at the wrong places; my favorite example is the following inscription on the plastic bag holding a Chengdu silk undershirt (slashes indicate the end of a line): LIGHT&SMOOTH&AIRY/RICHINELASTI CITYCOMF/ORTABLETOWEAR.

Lastly, let us mention romanization, which means transliteration into the Latin alphabet of a Chinese sound (such as "chrfan" above). There have been various romanization systems, which explains why some of the names used in this article have several spellings. As an example, the Chinese word for "small," which a Pole would pronounce "sial," is romanized "hsiao" in the Wade-Giles system, "syau" according to the Yale method, and "xiao" by the Pinyin transliteration the mainland has recently invented. (Taiwan pushed for romanization, perhaps to undermine PRC unity, until the PRC adopted it--at which point Taiwan immediately decried it as a bad idea.) Pinyin romanization is another example of China's foisting upon the outside world of its interpretation of the outside world's own systems, in effect ordering us to pronounce "x" like "sh," "q" like "ch," "zh" like "j," and so forth. This prompted a beleaguered American librarian confronted with the task of re-indexing all those Chinese texts to write a plaintive letter beginning "xurely you zhest." However, China seems to be quietly dropping romanization--wisely so, in my opinion, since the character system creates artificial unity by glossing over pronunciation changes in time and place, whereas a phonetic system would be too divisive for an empire.

* I do not mean to imply above that dictionary-making was the reason the brushstroke orthodoxy sequence was instituted per se; any causality would probably have to operate the other way, as writing presumably precedes dictionary-compilation. What I mean to express is that you will have a hard time finding a word in a Chinese dictionary unless you use the correct sequence of brushstrokes; similarly, in the United States, you will have trouble obtaining a passport unless you can produce a birth certificate, although the getting of passports is not the reason for having instituted the system of birth certificates in the first place. My colleague, Alex Gross, summarizes as follows:

"The reason for using the correct sequence of brushstrokes is not in order to find the character in a Chinese dictionary (though it may be superficially and temporarily helpful in this regard), but to make it possible to write fluent script characters readable by others and to read those that they write.

"To take the simplest possible character, '+,' 'shr," meaning '10.' To the Westerner it looks like a plus sign. In writing a plus sign, Westerners almost inevitably write the vertical stroke first and then the horizontal, to form a +. The Chinese, in writing 'shr,' do the reverse, starting with the horizontal and ending with the vertical. This is not at all arbitrary; when one becomes more advanced and writes the cursive script form of this character," the brushstroke drag will produce a right triangle counterclockwise from 3 to 12 o'clock. "If the Western order were followed," the right triangle from the brushstroke drag would be clockwise from 6 to 9 o'clock. "These are two very different forms for the eye. Now, multiply this effect by all the other characters requiring anywhere from three to twenty-three strokes, and it becomes obvious why a stroke order is needed."

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Toward an Anthropology of the Future

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD, is a translator, educator, and researcher.

Social scientists are usually chary of making predictions, probably because their disciplines lack the laboratory controls and objective criteria that allow the hard sciences to extrapolate deductions about future behavior. However, I contend that knowledge of the essential mechanisms of the past can support some considered projections of what can reasonably be expected in the future. For instance, my familiarity with the mind-set of the untreated survivors of child abuse led me to visit Russia as soon as the Soviet dictatorship ended, before the people realized they were free and started going haywire. Anthropologists have also noticed that if a society without a cash economy is suddenly given a chance to earn money, the elders invariably complain that the young people have stopped sharing. As Peter Farb pointed out in Humankind, in the absence of money or refrigeration, the best place to store surplus food is in somebody else’s belly; that way when he catches some game, he will share it with you. Money, however, upsets this delicate balance of sharing.

Probably the most important lesson cultural anthropology taught me was that there was a systemic and pervasive difference in mentality between hunter-gatherers and peasants in subsistence (non-money) economies. Hunter-gatherers value initiative and experimentation, think of challenge as an opportunity even in the face of a ninety percent failure rate, are satisfied with being allowed to use (rather than own) resources or territory, have small families (practicing infanticide if need be), and treat their children affectionately, encouraging them to be independent. Peasants value conformity and obedience, think of challenge as a threat, need outright ownership of their resources and territory, have large families, and treat their children like hardware. For hunter-gatherers, envy is an incentive to go out and get their own whatever, while envious peasants try to take the whatever away from its owner, or at least spoil the pleasure for him or her. Hunter-gather bands typically number twenty-five to fifty people, which makes perfect justice easier to achieve (on an asymptotic basis, of course) because everybody knows each other personally; since most of human prehistory involved living in such groups, one can readily understand the phylogenetic longing for community contained in theoretically egalitarian religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Communism. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is more fun, but also much more wasteful because it is based on selection and consumption of what the environment has to offer, whereas the peasant lifestyle is based on production and planning. On the other hand, peasants have a distinct power advantage because agriculture enables population densities of 400 times as many people in the same amount of space. The intermediate mind-set of pastoralism contains elements of both hunter-gatherer and peasant attitudes and may well be significant in making the transition.

I also learned that the different mentalities carry over into modern societies with a money economy. For instance, Americans think like hunter-gatherers rather than peasants, foraging in the supermarket rather than growing and storing food for their own consumption. According to its June 2000 issue, National Geographic takes some 29,000 photographs per article, and by my count uses no more than twenty-nine; raised on the planned scarcity of peasant thinking, Eastern European photojournalists would no doubt be horrified at the wastefulness of a 99.9 percent rejection rate. Consequently, the American labor market is good example of the wasteful hunter-gatherer mentality of selection vs. planning. Compared with European countries and their traditions of apprenticeship, American personnel management is so nonsupportive (probably because of all those immigrants who arrive pretrained) that it should be called what it really is: shopping! As a result, I believe the grief that Americans were surprised to feel for Princess Di is based on their ability to empathize with her situation: Whether at work or in the dating circuit, they know what it feels like to be rejected for the silliest of non-reasons and considered worthless except as a pop-up doll in somebody else’s coloring book.

Hunter-gatherers think of the economy as nature, warts and all, including waste, weeds, disorganization, and bullies—anything goes as it can take care of itself; peasants consider it more of a garden, where everything needs the gardener’s specific permission to exist. The crisis management of peasants tends to favor rationing and controls; bad times bring out the best in peasants, but the worst in hunter-gatherers. (See “The Mythfits” [Chciuk-Celt] for the escalation in violence I consider predictable in the United States unless systemic changes are made.) When hunter-gatherers start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they usually turn on each other in combative inward antagonism (infanticide, warfare, even cannibalism), which—unless countered by a transition to the pastoral or peasant mentality—eliminates all but the most brutal members of society, limiting population numbers and fostering the survival of the nastiest.

In case you are wondering, the hunter-gatherer mentality is now the exception rather than the rule, statistically speaking. Most of the world’s people think like peasants, and it is a mistake to ignore or confuse these disparate mind-sets. For instance, Americans do not realize that even their imperfect attempt at tolerant multiculturalism is a mere pimple, cosmically speaking, upon a planetful of peasants. If they did, they would not have imposed such an inherently unstable multicultural solution upon the Balkans at Dayton or tried to bring democracy to the autocratic Middle East (in any country, the government is the family structure writ large). Furthermore, economists are wearing blinders of their own if they naïvely expect a mere political shift toward a supposed democracy and market economy to turn eastern Europeans (peasants) into astute and adventurous investors (hunter-gatherers) overnight. As an example: When pop star Michael Jackson offered to invest a million dollars in a children’s amusement park outside Warsaw, the city fathers declined, claiming that such a project would promote prostitution.

It is easy to overlook the differences between these two mentalities, as when hunter-gatherers are lulled into a false sense of security by peasants using ostensible homology to paper over the divergences. As an example: Just as the Catholic Church co-opted pagan gods and rituals when converting the barbarians of Europe, the Communists during the Cold War intentionally obfuscated cross-cultural differences by giving their organizations such reassuringly homologous names that Westerners were fooled into assuming those institutions to be legitimate counterparts of their own.

Another example would be comparing the academic abuse of Slavic countries to that of the United States: From fraternity hazing to PhD orals, the latter is a derivative of the secret men’s clubs of hunter-gatherer societies and stops as soon as the initiate becomes a member; its statistical function is to promote in-group solidarity—anthropologists say that the fiercer the hazing ritual, the greater the subsequent loyalty. (In Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead said that the demise of white supremacy in the wake of the civil rights movement sounded like African-Americans were being accepted into fraternities. I see a similar pattern in the discrimination suffered by the first generation of groups immigrating to the United States; once they are assimilated, the kicks they got are transmitted to the next crop of immigrants.) In places like Poland and Russia, however, the abuse is permanent because it is a derivative of the peasant mentality: The professors are like the nobles of old (who destroy anyone they cannot capture as a satellite), sacred cows who can do no wrong and can mistreat interlopers with impunity until they die. The only way to circumvent their destructiveness is to accomplish something in spite of them and—this is important—let them take credit for what they tried to prevent. The closest equivalent in the United States: Imagine if Hollywood sycophancy had the same kind of transgenerational permanence as the antebellum South, with often self-indulgent landowners lording it over defenseless slaves. (Speaking of lording, men with power sometimes remind me of alpha males in nature programs: They think all the females in their territory belong to them.) See “The Mythfits,” “Anglos and Insects,” and “The Kom Dynasty” [Chciuk-Celt] for further instances of cross-cultural misunderstandings between hunter-gatherers and peasants and the behavior that can be expected when they are faced with dwindling resources.

Potential Futures for Hunter-Gatherers and Peasants

Assuming the world continues on its present path instead of making the systemic changes I believe to be urgent, let me hazard the following expectations based on the different mentalities of hunter-gatherers and peasants. Something similarly future-oriented and interdisciplinary has been done before, as documented in Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: When the Americans knew they would win World War II against the Japanese, they turned to a highly varied panel of consultants (which included historians, anthropologists, and experts in comparative literature) to advise them how to act as occupiers so as to minimize social damage.

First, since peasant envy tends to make the have-nots try to take away the haves’ goodies, or at least poison their enjoyment thereof, I expect the resentful Russians to behave like spoilers and sabotage others’ efforts just to prove that they are still a force to be reckoned with. In the foreseeable future, I think they will act like the macrosocial equivalent of the untreated survivors of child abuse, so this pathology should be given greater study by diplomats and others active on the international stage (see “Ruminations on Russia” [Chciuk-Celt]). Suffering alone does not ennoble people; if anything, it makes them bitter and abusive. “The Kom Dynasty,” my “Personal Preface” [Chciuk-Celt], and some of the travel articles on East and Southeast Asia document my much grimmer view of what I expect China to do, given its history and the PRC’s one-child policy; at the very least, we should stop outsourcing our jobs, thereby financing its military expansionism, which I expect to become a ghastly threat to future generations.

Second, contrary to economists’ belief that a prosperous economy generally leads to political liberalism, I expect prosperity in Asia to reinforce tradition and fascism. The respective resources that Latin American gold and Middle Eastern oil contributed to the Spanish empire and the Muslim countries basically enabled the artificial survival of medieval systems, because the people could afford physical and mental luxuries that would otherwise be wildly and prohibitively outdated. India’s recent prosperity is actually cementing the caste system, because the newly emergent middle classes can only afford to live like kings on their low wages if they have guaranteed access to cheap, docile labor, an abuse that I fear will culminate in bloodshed. There have been historical precedents for this syndrome: In the postwar United States and in China’s Sung Dynasty, prosperity reinforced conservative sexism because men could afford to dismiss women’s contribution to the labor force. What the PRC can do with its newfound riches is a particularly horrifying prospect, because China’s huge, obedient population and despotic, often ignorant rulership can combine to wreak an ecological havoc that can conceivably culminate in a Waterworld scenario (see the Three Gorges project in “The Kom Dynasty” [Chciuk-Celt]). We are already starting to see animal populations becoming extinct because Chinese medicine obsoletely prescribes things like tiger bone and rhinoceros horn, whose ingredients can be found much less destructively in calcium pills and keratin supplements.

Third, when hunter-gatherers start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they turn on each other in combative inward antagonism. This is starting to happen in the United States, where dwindling resources are making the people more aggressive rather than more efficient. Instead of becoming more entrenched in the behavior of the past (“getting back to basics”), we must realize that the wastefulness of the hunter-gatherer mentality needs to give way to some intelligent planning if we are to give our children a sustainable future; otherwise, it is only a matter of time before aggressive dominance establishes a feudal stranglehold or the army of rejects becomes destructive.

Toward a Fair and Sustainable Future

As usual, I hope my predictions are wrong, but I caution that dismissing them will not make them so. I believe we can counter them to a certain extent by encouraging equitable efficiency, discouraging institutionalized brutality, and remembering the intent behind existing laws and principles (the spirit rather than the letter). Unfortunately, legal professionals seem to be going in the opposite direction, probably because simple equity renders them personally less indispensable than do loopholes, technicalities, and procedural formalism.

We could start small, such as by reforming the more destructive elements of bilingual education and by remembering that au pairs are mother’s-helper teenagers, not professional nannies entrusted with household management; if anything, using them for elder care would teach them more about the local culture than they could learn from baby-sitting (“Au Pair Means Everybody Wins” and “Recalibrating Bilingual Education” [Chciuk-Celt]). Similar principles might be useful for reforming other counterproductive institutions and warped interpretations. Thereafter, perhaps business and political leaders can be persuaded to stop remaining deliberately difficult of access in their Versailles cocoons and consider including input from people who are neither their clones nor their cronies.

In terms of brutality: Hospitals should discontinue the savage practice of thirty-six-hour shifts, which compromises patient care and whose only conceivable usefulness would be weeding out doctors unfit for combat medicine. The media should also develop some social responsibility; if violence is consistently shown as entertainment, what can we expect if not more Columbines?

In more formal terms, changes in legislation could also help avoid exacerbating pointless conflict, preemptive hostility, and robber-baron predations—e.g., punitive damages for nuisance legal actions, laws preventing CEOs from giving themselves nine-figure bonuses even in the face of relentlessly mediocre performance, and the direct election of presidents. The electoral college system was instituted when people were wearing powdered wigs and white stockings, the roads were so terrible that it took the electors a month to reach Washington, and representative democracy had never been tried on such a scale before. It is senselessly and dangerously outdated in the computer age, as was shown in the 2000 election (cf. “When Bush Comes to Shove” [Chciuk-Celt]). The relatively recent phenomenon of vicious and counterproductive partisanship should be muzzled: Inflammatory rhetoric on the part of politicians was precisely what triggered Colombia’s civil war in 1946.

I also believe the Bill of Rights should be interpreted more in keeping with what the framers had in mind. For instance, since they called anything related to commercial sex “trafficking in hussies,” they would not have applied First Amendment protection to pornography and nude dancing—which represent free commerce, not free speech. Similarly, since old-fashioned muskets were virtually the only arms available for bearing at the time, the framers would have looked askance at machine guns, which no hunter can reasonably claim to need unless being attacked by two hundred stags in formation. The Fifth Amendment was obviously designed to outlaw torture, which had theretofore been a rather common method of obtaining confessions, not to allow parties to withhold testimony.

In terms of food production, hunter-gatherer food-acquisition methods such as fishing should be at least partially replaced by more efficient production methods, such as fish farming. PBS programs like Bill Moyers’s examination of innovative ecological techniques (“Earth on Edge,” aired in June 2001) show that established methodologies can be seriously destructive and that viable alternatives exist.

Once we have dismantled our blinders enough to see how much of the present is wasteful and counterproductive, we can direct our view toward the future, which we can be fairly sure will be radically different. A more complicated future will require more commonsensical legislation and fewer people who believe they are entitled to flout it, as well as a rethinking of the attitude that money equals invincibility.

The essays in my unpublished Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking contain further suggestions for how we need to reorient our mind-set from past to future so as to weather the systemic social changes we will need to, so as to survive as a society in which the pie is much smaller than before and more people are eating from it. An example from history: If the Johnson administration had included the input of Harvard’s Whiting and Whiting study, specifically the conclusion linking father absence and the sons’ tendency toward violent behavior as a reaction formation to an initial female identification, its welfare program would probably not have unwittingly exacerbated crime by encouraging fatherless households.

If nothing is done, I fear that dwindling resources will cause Americans to turn on each other because, like classic hunter-gatherers, they do not handle deprivation well. I believe the following prefigures such a scenario: Around 1980, there was a mugging spree in New York’s Times Square area, which lasted several hours. When the criminals ran out of passersby to victimize, the bigger muggers turned on the smaller muggers and relieved them of their loot.

A good analogy for planning a fairer and more efficient future would be three swimming pools wide enough for swimming eight abreast, identical except for their management philosophies. The first is a hunter-gatherer laneless free-for-all; this sounds like perfect freedom, but since the swimmers typically go back and forth along the same imaginary track, all that wasted space makes the pool feel crowded if there are more than eight people because of the frustration and social friction involved in having to finagle a new opening for every lap. The second (peasants) is dominated by groups; isolated individuals and minorities must either settle for some corner nobody else wants or wait for the dominant groups to leave. It is impossible to swim a straight line because the group members think the tyranny of the majority entitles them to do anything they want; if there is more than one large group, the best that can be hoped for is partition, with everyone scurrying to grab as much territory as possible before the separation. If this sounds like the Balkans, that is by no means a coincidence.

The third type is divided into four lanes (the first for loafing, the others in a speed-graduated manner) in which swimmers keep moving and stay to the right, as though driving a car; this pool can be used comfortably, and with very little conflict, by at least thirty-two people. The interdisciplinary logic I am advocating can similarly smooth our switch to a more logical system.

The transition between the hunter-gatherer and peasant mentalities is lost in the mists of prehistory, but it must have been rather traumatic unless it was quite gradual. We, however, can do a lot better. Modern humanity is adept at systems design (from industrial engineering to packaging-machinery to computer programs) and has enough knowledge to enable planning for a more efficient and equitable future, one that avoids the brutality with which wasteful hunter-gatherers and fascist peasants have traditionally solved the problem of scarce resources.

References

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Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. New York: World Publishing Company.

Chciuk-Celt, Alexandra. Dismantling Binders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking. Unpublished.

Chua, Amy. 2003. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Doubleday.

Farb, Peter. 1978. Humankind. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company.

Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Herrmanns, Mathias. 1949. Die Nomaden von Tibet. Die sozial-wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Hirtenkulturen in A Mdo und von Innerasien. Vienna: Herold Verlag.

Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal. 1968. Religion and Culture. New York: The MacMillan Company.

McClelland, David. 1961. The Achieving Society. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc.

Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. 1972. New York: William Morrow Publishing.

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Zakaria, Fareed. 2003. The Future of Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.

Around 1996, the American Anthropologist published a cross-cultural study which found that, statistically speaking, the most violent groups are not t hose that aspire to power, but those which want to retain or regain their former power. History has taught me that such power is usually based upon a situation which is in large part artificial, and therefore unsustainable in the long run. Other anthropological studies have found that in cultures which think like hunter-gatherers (that’s us), people react to a scarcity of resources by moving elsewhere and start turning on each other when there is noplace left to go.

I feel that this is happening in the United States now that the working class has lost what it mistakenly thought was its birthright, not a historical fluke. (Like the proverbial second chick in the nature programs, the working class only does well if resources are exceptionally abundant.) In the decades after World War II, the pie was a lot bigger and women and minorities were denied full access; the US won the war, had no competition, and enjoyed full employment; employers started providing medical insurance so as to get around the government’s anti-inflationary salary caps, the GI bill was educating veterans and guaranteeing mortgages, the national debt was nowhere near its present level, and, most importantly, the super-rich were paying 90% in taxes, which meant they had no incentive to be super-greedy. The economic golden days of the fifties and sixties have now largely evaporated, and it is the money-boys who have dismantled the system. People who think a reactionary strongman will re-empower them (Italy, Spain, and Germany thought so, and look where it got them) do not realize that we were not great because of the way we acted, but rather had the luxury of acting thus because we were great. They are thus sadly confusing cause and effect.

The tax cuts of the Reagan years started changing the situation drastically and swinging the pendulum of artificiality in the other direction. The money-boys greedy for cheap labor began outsourcing jobs to a Communist country and pocketing the wages and health benefits of the Americans they had thrown out of work (which would have gotten them lynched for high treason just a few decades earlier) now that they could keep more of all that money due to lower taxes. This also deprived the fiscal authorities of revenues on those lost jobs and the lower taxes on the rich, leading to the trillions of dollars in debt which basically leave Joe Blow holding the bag. (I also suspect that the coronavirus could likely have been contained within Wuhan if that city were not the source of cheap international labor because it housed so many English-language schools.) In addition, China began reaping the windfall engendered by American greed, using it to invest in poor countries and flex her economic and military muscle; she will soon no longer be too afraid of the US to invade Australia. The People’s Liberation Army, the chief joint venture partner for foreign investment, is making money hand over fist and is not using it to buy flowers.

All this makes our money-boys threefold traitors and reminds me of the irresponsible Polish nobility that sold its own people down the river for personal gain in the 17th century, which resulted in Poland’s being dismembered in the 18th by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. We are basically financing our potential enemies, namely China, the drug trade, and religious extremists, and can be financially gutted by them unless we act.

As regards Muslims, I believe those who say “the Koran is our constitution” and practice suicide bombing are much more of a threat than the Soviets ever were; they now also appear to be accomplishing by demographic means (making lots of money and babies) what they failed to do militarily in the eighth and seventeenth centuries, namely conquer and dominate the West. It is troubling that many Asian immigrants behave like conquerors more than like immigrants; I have heard several say that their ambition is to turn the United States into a Muslim country.

Regarding possible action: for starters, what possessed Congress to let China and the Saudis hold portions of our debt? (At the very least, legislation should be enacted which would cancel our debt to any nation with whom we are at war; that might make the PRC think twice before invading whatever nation they covet.) Why do people keep using gas-guzzlers, polluting the environment and giving Middle Eastern oil despots more power? Why do so many claim that climate change is a matter of opinion, not of science? Why is the most modern nation on earth hostage to a totally outdated electoral system designed by states jealous of their sovereignty? Why does so much of the electorate support cynical manipulators and clearly certifiable megalomaniacs who are refeudalizing our economy? Why do voters mistake their civic responsibility for Facebook liking and thereupon refuse to vote, purporting to agonize about whether to manifest their displeasure by voting for a third-party candidate or not at all? And why continue to criminalize the use of soft drugs—which are less dangerous than alcohol—thus wasting resources on hypocritical prohibition? (Ironically, if the federal government controlled the drug trade, the national debt and a lot of criminal danger could probably be wiped out very quickly.)

The mantra of “better education” is no panacea for our economic woes. People whose IQ is average or below are unlikely to benefit from academic schooling; besides, all those computer engineers whose jobs were outsourced to India were highly educated, as is yours truly. We must reestablish manufacturing. At the very least, I would like to suggest we start with a customs-duty surcharge on goods imported from low-cost countries so as to help pay unemployment benefits. It would not impoverish the shareholders of the outsourcing companies to have to settle for a 3,000% profit instead of 4,000%, or CEO’s to give themselves only $200 million in bonuses rather than $300 million. According to a labor activist on Bill Moyers’ PBS program, the Southeast Asian women who hand-stitch athletic shoes get paid 17 cents per shoe and have to pay for the needle and thread themselves; the production cost of the shoes is thus probably less than the sales tax on their price in a typical American state.

My final apprehension is not about the 1 per cent’s conscious greed, but by the 99 per cent’s unconscious id; after all, home-grown pathologies such as racism were hardly foisted upon the innocent masses by evil dictators. For the past few decades, American parents seem to have been raising their children like pampered pets that can do no wrong instead of future responsible citizens. This may represent the parents’ concern for their children’s self-esteem, their perception that the world is unrelentingly hostile, and/or their guilt over not spending more time with their kids. I also contend that TV commercials and reality-show competitions flatter viewers into thinking they are big shots who know it all and are not subject to correction. Such children grow up useless and insolent, like micro-sultans or the pre-revolutionary nobility in France: the world is there for their benefit, and everyone must defer to them forever. They thus make the worst workers, especially since yuppie management gives them unsupervised decision-making power; American business now feels like a department store in which the gift-wrappers are in charge of human resources. (For instance, the proofreaders and project managers at some translation agencies are straight out of school, know no languages, and have likely never read a contract or seen the inside of a business office before, but they consider themselves more important than the translators.) It is only a matter of time before many meaningless non-jobs evaporate when employers realize that pose-striking is only economically productive for rock stars, at which point the young will have no careers (except for summer-type jobs), no social safety net (pensions, Medicare, and Social Security are already disintegrating), and no family (except for the aging parents they have to take care of because they own the house). When these coddled overgrown teenagers become disgruntled have-nots, I expect them to turn dangerous because of the anthropological tendencies adduced above. If the Chinese or the Jihadists ever take over, they will find among such spoiled, resentful people a pool of self-important officials almost as arrogant and ignorant as their own.

I hope I am wrong and that the kids will mature into a rational counterweight to all those dangerously emboldened moral rednecks who are digging their own offspring’s graves, but nevertheless believe we must now ratchet down our expectations and modify our behavior, not blindly mouth the glory-day slogans of reality-denying reactionaries. Otherwise, we can only look forward to a future of economic chaos and the undignified or vicious behavior it might well carry in its wake, and which will make the Tea Party look like a tea party. Trumpism has since proved my point. I fear that if there is a future, history will state that democracy proved no better a system of government than autocracy because the underdogs are just as selfish and irresponsible as the top dogs.

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